Jrav 


HITHER 


AND 


THITHER 

IN 

GERMANY 


WILLIAM  DEAN 
HO  WELLS 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA 
AT   LOS  ANGELES 


Travel  Companions 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

CERTAIN   DELIGHTFUL  ENGLISH  TOWNS 

LONDON  FILMS 

ROMAN  HOLIDAYS 

SEVEN  ENGLISH  CITIES 

FAMILIAR  SPANISH  TRAVELS 

LITTLE  SWISS  SOJOURN 

Bound  Uniform  Limp  Leather 
Illustrated 

BY 

WILLIAM  DEAN  HOWELLS 


Harper  &  Brothers  Publishers 

[ESTABLISHED   18171 


Copyright  by  Underwood  &  Underwood 
MAINZ 
Bird's-eye  view  of  the  city 


W.  D.  HOWELLS 


Illustrated 


HARPER  &   BROTHERS    PUBLISHERS 

NEW   YORK    AND    LONDON 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 


Copyright.    1920,  by  Harper  &  Brothers 

Printed  in  the  United  States  of  America 

Published  January,  1920 

M-T 


H- 


CONTENTS 

CHAP.  PAGB 

I.  HAMBURG        3 

II.  LEIPSIC       13 

III.  CARLSBAD        24 

IV.  NUREMBERG 39 

V.  ANSBACH .  51 

VI.  WURZBURG 70 

VII.  WEIMAR 83 

VIII.  BERLIN 96 

IX.  FRANKFORT 110 

X.  MAYENCE  AND  THE  RIVER  RHINE 115 

XI.  DUSSELDORF 123 


HITHER   AND   THITHER 
IN    GERMANY 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

IT  is  now  twenty  years  more  or  less  since  Basil  March, 
then  an  elderly  editor,  left  his  periodical  in  New  York, 
and  went  out  to  take  the  Cure  at  Carlsbad.  He  took  the 
Cure  in  the  manner  prescribed  by  the  doctor  there,  and 
then  at  the  end  of  four  weeks,  the  doctor  allowed  him  to 
take  the  After-Cure  according  to  his  own  fancy.  "Go 
where  you  please — to  Innsbruck  if  you  like,  or  to  Holland. 
Keep  traveling,  but  don't  travel  too  hard,"  and  Mrs. 
March,  who  had  come  to  Carlsbad  with  him,  promised  the 
doctor  that  he  should  follow  his  advice  to  the  letter. 
She  was  a  Bostonian  by  birth,  and  they  had  not  lived  in 
New  York  so  long  that  she  did  not  feel  able  to  keep  her 
word.  They  sailed  late  in  the  summer  to  Hamburg,  and 
they  landed  at  Cuxhaven,  which  they  found  by  experience 
was  some  three  hours  away  from  the  ancient  Hanseatic 
metropolis. 


HITHER    AND    THITHER 
IN    GERMANY 


i 

HAMBURG 

THE  long  train  which  they  took  was  solely  for  their 
steamer's  passengers,  and  it  was  of  several  transitional 
and  tentative  types  of  cars.  Some  were  still  the  old  coach- 
body  carriages;  but  most  were  of  a  strange  corridor  ar- 
rangement, with  the  aisle  at  the  side,  and  the  seats  cross- 
ing from  it,  with  compartments  sometimes  rising  to  the 
roof  and  sometimes  rising  only  half-way.  No  two  cars 
seemed  quite  alike,  but  all  were  very  comfortable;  and 
when  the  train  began  to  run  out  through  the  little  sea- 
side town  into  the  country  the  old  delight  of  foreign  travel 
began.  Most  of  the  houses  were  little  and  low  and  gray, 
with  ivy  or  flowering  vines  covering  their  walls  to  their 
brown-tiled  roofs;  there  was  here  and  there  a  touch  of 
Northern  Gothic  in  the  architecture;  but  usually  where 
it  was  pretentious  it  was  in  the  Mansard  taste,  which  was 
so  bad  with  us  a  generation  ago  and  is  still  very  bad  in 
Cuxhaven. 

The  fields,  flat  and  wide,  were  dotted  with  familiar 
shapes  of  Holstein  cattle,  herded  by  little  girls,  with  their 

hair  in  yellow  pigtails.    The  gray,  stormy  sky  hung  low, 

3 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

and  broke  in  fitful  rains;  but  perhaps  for  the  inclement 
season  of  midsummer  in  northern  Germany  it  was  not 
very  cold.  Flowers  were  blooming  along  the  embankments 
and  in  the  rank  green  fields  with  a  dogged  energy;  in  the 
various  distances  were  groups  of  trees  embowering  cottages 
and  even  villages,  and  always  along  the  ditches  and  water- 
courses were  double  lines  of  low  willows.  At  the  first 
stop  the  train  made,  the  passengers  flocked  to  the  refresh- 
ment-booth, prettily  arranged  beside  the  station,  where 
the  abundance  of  cherries  and  strawberries  gave  proof 
that  vegetation  was  in  many  respects  superior  to  the  ele- 
ments. But  it  was  not  of  the  profusion  of  the  sausages, 
and  the  ham  which  openly  in  slices  or  covertly  in  sand- 
wiches claimed  its  primacy  in  the  German  affections; 
every  form  of  this  was  flanked  by  tall  glasses  of  beer. 

A  number  of  the  natives  stood  by  and  stared  unsmiling 
at  the  train,  which  had  broken  out  in  a  rash  of  little 
American  flags  at  every  window.  This  boyish  display, 
which  must  have  made  the  Americans  themselves  laugh, 
if  their  sense  of  humor  had  not  been  lost  in  their  impas- 
sioned patriotism,  was  the  last  expression  of  unity  among 
the  passengers,  in  their  sea-solidarity.  After  they  reached 
Hamburg  they  no  longer  knew  one  another,  but  selfishly 
struggled  for  the  good-will  of  porters  and  inspectors. 
There  was  really  no  such  haste;  but  none  could  govern 
themselves  against  the  common  frenzy.  With  the  porter 
he  secured  March  conspired  and  perspired  to  win  the 
attention  of  a  cold-eyed  but  not  unkindly  inspector. 
The  official  opened  one  trunk,  and  after  a  glance  at  it 
marked  all  as  passed,  and  then  there  ensued  a  heroic 
strife  with  the  porters  as  to  the  pieces  which  were  to  go  to 
the  Berlin  station  for  their  journey  next  day  and  the 
pieces  which  were  to  go  to  the  hotel  overnight.  At  last 
the  division  was  made;  the  Marches  got  into  a  cab  of 

the  first  class;   and  the  porter,  crimson  and  steaming  at 

4 


HAMBURG 

every  pore  from  the  physical  and  intellectual  strain,  went 
back  into  the  station. 

They  had  got  the  number  of  their  cab  from  the  police- 
man who  stands  at  the  door  of  all  large  German  stations 
and  supplies  the  traveler  with  a  metallic  check  for  the 
sort  of  vehicle  he  demands.  They  were  not  proud,  but 
it  seemed  best  not  to  risk  a  second-class  cab  in  a  strange 
city,  and  when  their  first-class  cab  came  creaking  and 
limping  out  of  the  rank  they  saw  how  wise  they  had 
been,  if  one  of  the  second  class  could  have  been  worse,  j 

As  they  rattled  away  from  the  station  they  saw  yet 
another  kind  of  turnout,  which  they  were  destined  to  see 
more  and  more  in  the  German  lands.  It  was  that  team 
of  a  woman  harnessed  with  a  dog  to  a  cart  which  the 
women  of  no  other  country  can  see  without  a  sense  of 
personal  insult.  March  tried  to  take  the  humorous  view, 
and  complained  that  they  had  not  been  offered  the  choice 
of  such  an  equipage  by  the  policeman,  but  his  wife  would 
not  be  amused.  She  said  that  no  country  which  suffered 
such  a  thing  could  be  truly  civilized,  though  he  made  her 
observe  that  no  city  in  the  world,  except  Boston  or 
Brooklyn,  was  probably  so  thoroughly  trolleyed  as  Ham- 
burg. The  hum  of  the  electric-car  was  everywhere,  and 
everywhere  the  shriek  of  the  wires  overhead;  batlike 
flights  of  connecting-plates  traversed  all  the  perspectives 
through  which  they  drove  to  the  pleasant  little  hotel  they 
had  chosen. 

On  one  hand  their  windows  looked  toward  a  basin  of 
the  Elbe,  where  stately  white  swans  were  sailing;  and 
on  the  other  to  the  new  Rathhaus,  over  the  trees  that 
deeply  shaded  the  perennial  mud  of  a  cold,  dim  public 
garden,  where  water-proof  old  women  and  impervious 
nurses  sat,  and  children  played  in  the  long  twilight  of  the 
sour,  rain-soaked  summer  of  the  fatherland.  It  was  all 
picturesque,  and  withindoors  there  was  the  novelty  of 
2  5 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

the  meager  carpets  and  stalwart  furniture  of  the  Germans 
and  their  beds,  which  after  so  many  ages  of  Anglo-Saxon 
satire  remain  immutably  preposterous.  They  are  ap- 
parently imagined  for  the  stature  of  sleepers  who  have 
shortened  as  they  broadened;  the  pillows  are  triangularly 
shaped  to  bring  the  chin  tight  upon  the  breast  under  the 
bloated  feather  bulk  which  is  meant  for  covering,  and 
which  rises  over  the  sleeper  from  a  thick  substratum  of 
cotton  coverlet,  neatly  buttoned  into  the  upper  sheet, 
with  the  effect  of  a  portly  waistcoat. 

The  hotel  was  illumined  by  the  kindly  splendor  of  the 
uniformed  portier,  who  had  met  the  travelers  at  the 
door,  and  a  friendly  air  diffused  itself  through  the  whole 
house.  At  the  dinner,  which,  if  not  so  cheap  as  they  had 
somehow  hoped,  was  by  no  means  bad,  they  took  counsel 
with  the  English-speaking  waiter  as  to  what  entertain- 
ment Hamburg  could  offer  for  the  evening,  and  by  the 
time  they  had  drunk  their  coffee  they  had  courage  for 
the  Circus  Renz,  which  seemed  to  be  all  there  was. 

The  conductor  of  the  trolley-car  which  they  hailed  at 
the  street  corner,  stopped  it  and  got  off  the  platform, 
and  stood  in  the  street  until  they  were  safely  aboard, 
without  telling  them  to  step  lively,  or  pulling  them  up 
the  steps,  or  knuckling  them  in  the  back  to  make  them 
move  forward.  He  let  them  get  fairly  seated  before  he 
started  the  car,  and  so  lost  the  fun  of  seeing  them  lurch 
and  stagger  violently  and  wildly  clutch  each  other  for 
support.  The  Germans  have  so  little  sense  of  humor  that 
probably  no  one  in  the  car  would  have  been  amused  to 
see  the  strangers  flung  upon  the  floor.  No  one  apparently 
found  it  droll  that  the  conductor  should  touch  his  cap 
to  them  when  he  asked  for  their  fare;  no  one  smiled  at 
their  efforts  to  make  him  understand  where  they  wished 
to  go,  and  he  did  not  wink  at  the  other  passengers  in 

trying  to  find  out.  Whenever  the  car  stopped  he  descended 

6 


HAMBURG 

first,  and  did  not  remount  till  the  dismounting  passengers 
had  taken  time  to  get  well  away  from  it.  When  the 
Marches  got  into  the  wrong  car  in  coming  home,  and 
were  carried  beyond  their  street,  the  conductor  would  not 
take  their  fare. 

The  kindly  civility  which  environed  them  went  far  to 
alleviate  the  inclemency  of  the  climate;  it  began  to  rain 
as  soon  as  they  left  the  shelter  of  the  car,  but  a  citizen 
of  whom  they  asked  the  nearest  way  to  the  Circus  Renz 
was  so  anxious  to  have  them  go  aright  that  they  did  not 
mind  the  wet,  and  the  thought  of  his  goodness  embittered 
March's  self-reproach  for  under-tipping  the  sort  of  gor- 
geous heyduk,  with  a  staff  like  a  drum-major's,  who  left 
big  place  at  the  circus  door  to  get  their  tickets.  He  brought 
them  back  with  a  magnificent  bow,  and  was  then  as 
visibly  disappointed  with  the  share  of  the  change  returned 
to  him  as  a  child  would  have  been. 

They  went  to  their  places  with  the  sting  of  his  disap- 
pointment rankling  in  their  hearts.  "One  ought  always 
to  overpay  them,"  March  sighed,  "and  I  will  do  it  from 
this  time  forth;  we  shall  not  be  much  the  poorer  for  it. 
That  heyduk  is  not  going  to  get  off  with  less  than  a  mark 
when  we  come  out."  As  an  earnest  of  his  good  faith  he 
gave  the  old  man  who  showed  them  to  their  box  a  tip 
that  made  him  bow  double,  and  he  bought  every  con- 
ceivable libretto  and  play-bill  offered  him  at  prices  fixed 
by  his  remorse.  " One  ought  to  do  it,"  he  said.  "We  are 
of  the  quality  of  good  geniuses  to  these  poor  souls;  we 
are  Fortune — in  disguise;  we  are  money  found  in  the 
road.  It  is  an  accursed  system,  but  they  are  more  its 
victims  than  we." 

The  house  was  full  from  floor  to  roof  when  they  came 
in,  and  every  one  was  intent  upon  the  two  Spanish  clowns, 
Lui-Lui  and  Soltamontes,  whose  drolleries  spoke  the 

universal  language  of  circus  humor,  and  needed  no  trans- 

7 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

lation  into  either  German  or  English.  They  had  missed 
by  an  event  or  two  the  more  patriotic  attraction  of  "Miss 
Darlings,  the  american  Star,"  as  she  was  billed  in  English, 
but  they  were  in  time  for  one  of  those  equestrian  per- 
formances which  leave  the  spectator  almost  exanimate 
from  their  prolixity  and  the  pantomimic  piece  which 
closed  the  evening. 

This  was  not  given  until  nearly  the  whole  house  had 
gone  out  and  stayed  itself  with  beer  and  cheese  and  ham 
and  sausage,  in  the  restaurant  which  purveys  these  light 
refreshments  in  the  summer  theaters  all  over  Germany. 
When  the  people  came  back  gorged  to  the  throat,  they 
sat  down  in  the  right  mood  to  enjoy  the  allegory  of  "the 
Enchantedmountain's  Fantasy;  the  Mountain-episodes; 
the  Highinteresting  Sledge-Courses  on  the  Steep  Accliv- 
ities; the  Amazing  Uprush  of  the  thence  plunging  Four 
Trains,  which  arrive  with  Lightningswif  tness  at  the  Top  of 
the  over-forty-feet-high  Mountain — the  Highest  Triumph 
of  the  To-day's  Circus-Art;  the  Sledgejourney  in  the 
Wizardmountain,  and  the  Fairy  Ballet  in  the  Realm  of 
the  Ghostprince,  with  Gold  and  Silver,  Jewel,  Bloomghosts, 
Gnomes,  Gnomesses,  and  Dwarfs,  in  never-till-now-seen 
Splendor  of  Costume."  The  Marches  were  happy  in  this 
allegory,  and  happier  in  the  ballet,  which  is  everywhere 
delightfully  innocent,  and  which  here  appealed  with  the 
large  flat  feet  and  the  plain  good  faces  of  the  coryphees 
to  all  that  was  simplest  and  sweetest  in  their  natures. 
They  could  not  have  resisted,  if  they  had  wished,  that 
environment  of  good-will;  and  if  it  had  not  been  for  the 
disappointed  heyduk,  they  would  have  got  home  from 
their  evening  at  the  Circus  Renz  without  a  pang. 

In  the  audience  Mrs.  March  had  seen  German  officers 
for  the  first  time  in  Hamburg,  and  she  meant,  if  unremit- 
ting question  could  bring  out  the  truth,  to  know  why  she 

had  not  met  any  others.     Their  absence  was  plausibly 

8 


HAMBURG 

explained,  the  next  morning,  by  the  young  German  friend 
who  came  in  to  see  the  Marches  at  breakfast.  He  said 
Hamburg  had  been  so  long  a  free  republic  that  the  pres- 
ence of  a  large  imperial  garrison  was  distasteful  to  the 
people,  and,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  there  were  very  few 
soldiers  quartered  there,  whether  the  authorities  chose  to 
indulge  the  popular  grudge  or  not.  He  was  himself  in  a 
joyful  flutter  of  spirits,  for  he  had  just  the  day  before 
got  his  release  from  military  service.  He  gave  them  a 
notion  of  what  the  rapture  of  a  man  reprieved  from  death 
might  be,  and  he  was  as  radiantly  happy  in  the  ill  health 
which  had  got  him  his  release  as  if  it  had  been  the  greatest 
blessing  of  Heaven.  He  bubbled  over  with  smiling  regrets 
that  he  should  be  leaving  his  home  for  the  first  stage  of 
the  journey  which  he  was  to  take  in  search  of  strength 
just  as  they  had  come,  and  he  pressed  them  to  say  if  there 
were  not  something  that  he  could  do  for  them. 

"Yes,"  said  Mrs.  March,  with  a  promptness  surprising 
to  her  husband,  who  could  think  of  nothing;  "tell  us 
where  Heinrich  Heine  lived  when  he  was  in  Hamburg. 
My  husband  has  a  great  passion  for  him  and  wants  to 
look  him  up  everywhere." 

March  had  forgotten  that  Heine  ever  lived  in  Ham- 
burg, and  the  young  man  had  apparently  never  known  it. 
His  face  fell;  he  wished  to  make  Mrs.  March  believe  that 
it  was  only  Heine's  uncle  who  had  lived  there;  but  she 
was  firm,  and  when  he  had  asked  among  the  hotel  people 
he  came  back  gladly  owning  that  he  was  wrong,  and  that 
the  poet  used  to  live  in  Konigstrasse,  which  was  very 
near  by,  and  where  they  could  easily  know  the  house  by 
his  bust  set  in  its  front.  The  portier  and  the  head  waiter 
shared  his  ecstasy  in  so  easily  obliging  the  friendly  Ameri- 
can pair,  and  joined  him  in  minutely  instructing  the  driver 
when  they  shut  them  into  their  carriage. 

They  did  not  know  that  his  was  almost  the  only  laugh- 

9 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

ing  face  they  should  see  in  the  serious  German  Empire; 
just  as  they  did  not  know  that  it  rained  there  every  day. 
As  they  drove  off  in  the  gray  drizzle  with  the  unfounded 
hope  that  sooner  or  later  the  weather  would  be  fine,  they 
bade  then*  driver  be  very  slow  in  taking  them  through 
Konigstrasse,  so  that  he  should  by  no  means  miss  Heine's 
dwelling,  and  he  duly  stopped  in  front  of  a  house  bearing 
the  promised  bust.  They  dismounted  in  order  to  revere 
it  more  at  their  ease,  but  the  bust  proved,  by  an  irony 
bitterer  than  the  sick,  heartbreaking,  brilliant  Jew  could 
have  imagined,  in  his  cruelest  moment,  to  be  that  of  the 
German  Milton,  the  respectable  poet  Klopstock,  whom 
Heine  abhorred  and  mocked  so  pitilessly. 

In  fact,  it  was  here  that  the  good,  much-forgotten  Klop- 
stock dwelt  when  he  came  home  to  live  with  a  comfort- 
able pension  from  the  Danish  government;  and  the  pil- 
grims to  the  mistaken  shrine  went  asking  about  among 
the  neighbors  in  Konigstrasse  for  some  manner  of  house 
where  Heine  might  have  lived;  they  would  have  been 
willing  to  accept  a  flat,  or  any  sort  of  two-pair  back.  The 
neighbors  were  somewhat  moved  by  the  anxiety  of  the 
strangers;  but  they  were  not  so  much  moved  as  neighbors 
in  Italy  would  have  been.  There  was  no  eager  and  smiling 
sympathy  in  the  little  crowd  that  gathered  to  see  what  was 
going  on;  they  were  patient  of  question  and  kind  in  their 
helpless  response,  but  they  were  not  gay.  To  a  man  they 
had  not  heard  of  Heine;  even  the  owner  of  a  sausage- 
and-blood-pudding  shop  across  the  way  had  not  heard  of 
him;  the  clerk  of  a  stationer-and-bookseller's  next  to  the 
butcher's  had  heard  of  him,  but  he  had  never  heard  that 
he  lived  in  Konigstrasse;  he  never  had  heard  he  lived  in 
Hamburg. 

The  pilgrims  to  the  fraudulent  shrine  got  back  into 
their  carriage  and  drove  sadly  away,  instructing  their 

driver   with   the  rigidity  which   their  limited   German 

10 


HAMBURG 

favored,  not  to  let  any  house  with  a  bust  in  its  front 
escape  him.  He  promised,  and  took  his  course  out  through 
Konigstrasse,  and  suddenly  they  found  themselves  in  a 
world  of  such  eld  and  quaintness  that  they  forgot  Heine 
as  completely  as  any  of  his  countrymen  had  done.  They 
were  in  steep  and  narrow  streets,  that  crooked  and  turned 
with  no  apparent  purpose  of  leading  anywhere,  among 
houses  that  looked  down  upon  them  with  an  astonished 
stare  from  the  leaden-sashed  windows  of  their  timber- 
laced  gables.  The  fagades,  with  their  lattices  stretching 
in  bands  quite  across  them,  and  with  their  steep  roofs 
climbing  high  in  successions  of  blinking  dormers,  were 
more  richly  medieval  than  anything  the  travelers  had 
dreamed  of  before,  and  they  feasted  themselves  upon  the 
unimagined  picturesqueness  with  a  leisurely  minuteness 
which  brought  responsive  gazers  everywhere  to  the  win- 
dows; windows  were  set  ajar;  shop  doors  were  darkened 
by  curious  figures  from  within,  and  the  traffic  of  the  tor- 
tuous alleys  was  interrupted  by  their  progress.  They  could 
not  have  said  which  delighted  them  more — the  houses 
in  the  immediate  foreground  or  the  sharp,  high  gables 
in  the  perspectives  and  the  background;  but  all  were  like 
the  painted  scenes  of  the  stage,  and  they  had  a  pleasant 
difficulty  in  realizing  that  they  were  not  persons  in  some 
romantic  drama. 

The  illusion  remained  with  them  and  qualified  the  im- 
pression which  Hamburg  made  by  the  decorous  activity 
and  Parisian  architecture  of  her  business  streets;  by  the 
turmoil  of  her  quays,  and  the  innumerable  masts  and 
chimneys  of  her  shipping.  At  the  heart  of  all  was  that 
quaintness,  that  picturesqueness  of  the  past,  which  em- 
bodied the  spirit  of  the  old  Hanseatic  city  and  seemed 
the  expression  of  the  home-side  of  her  history.  The  sense 
of  this  gained  strength  from  such  slight  study  of  her 

annals  as  they  afterward  made,  and  assisted  the  digestion 

11 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

of  some  morsels  of  tough  statistics.  In  the  shadow  of  those 
Gothic  houses  the  fact  that  Hamburg  was  one  of  the 
greatest  coffee  marts  and  money  marts  of  the  world  had 
a  romantic  glamour;  and  the  fact  that  in  the  four  years 
from  1870  till  1874  a  quarter  of  a  million  emigrants  sailed 
on  her  ships  for  the  United  States  seemed  to  stretch  a 
nerve  of  kindred  feeling  from  those  medieval  streets 
through  the  whole  shabby  length  of  Third  Avenue. 

It  was  perhaps  in  this  glamour,  or  this  feeling  of  com- 
mercial solidarity,  that  March  went  to  have  a  look  at  the 
Hamburg  Bourse,  in  the  beautiful  new  Rathhaus.  It  was 
not  undergoing  repairs,  it  was  too  new  for  that;  but  it 
was  in  construction,  and  so  it  fulfilled  the  function  of  a 
public  edifice  in  withholding  its  entire  interest  from  the 
stranger.  He  could  not  get  into  the  Senate  Chamber; 
but  the  Bourse  was  free  to  him,  and  when  he  stepped 
within  it  rose  at  him  with  a  roar  of  voices  and  of  feet  like 
the  New  York  Stock  Exchange.  The  spectacle  was  not 
so  frantic;  people  were  not  shaking  their  fists  or  fingers 
in  one  another's  noses;  but  they  were  all  wild  in  the  tamer 
German  way,  and  he  was  glad  to  mount  from  the  Bourse 
to  the  poor  little  art  gallery  up-stairs,  and  to  shut  out  its 
clamor.  He  was  not  so  glad  when  he  looked  round  on 
these  his  first  examples  of  modern  German  art.  The  cus- 
todian led  him  gently  about  and  said  which  things  were 
for  sale,  and  it  made  his  heart  ache  to  see  how  bad  they 
were,  and  to  think  that,  bad  as  they  were,  he  could  not 
buy  any  of  them. 


II 

LEIPSIC 

i 

IN  the  start  from  Cuxhaven  the  passengers  had  the  ir- 
responsible Sase  of  people  ticketed  through,  and  the 
steamship  company  had  still  the  charge  of  their  baggage. 
But  when  the  Marches  left  Hamburg  for  Leipsic  (where 
they  had  decided  to  break  the  long  pull  to  Carlsbad)  all 
the  anxieties  of  European  travel,  dimly  remembered  from 
former  European  days,  offered  themselves  for  recognition. 
A  porter  vanished  with  their  hand-baggage  before  they 
could  note  any  trait  in  him  for  identification;  other  port- 
ers made  away  with  their  trunks;  and  the  interpreter 
who  helped  March  buy  his  tickets,  with  a  vocabulary  of 
strictly  railroad  English,  had  to  help  him  find  the  pieces  in 
the  baggage-room,  curiously  estranged  in  a  mountain  of 
alien  boxes.  One  official  weighed  them;  another  gave  him 
an  illegible  scrap  of  paper  which  recorded  their  number 
and  destination.  The  interpreter  and  the  porters  took 
their  fees  with  a  professional  effect  of  dissatisfaction,  and 
March  went  to  wait  with  his  wife  amid  the  smoking  and 
eating  and  drinking  in  the  restaurant.  They  burst  through 
with  the  rest  when  the  doors  were  opened  to  the  train, 
and  followed  a  glimpse  of  the  porter  with  their  hand-bags 
as  he  ran  down  the  platform,  still  bent  upon  escaping 
them,  and  brought  him  to  bay  at  last  in  a  car  where  he 
had  got  very  good  seats  for  them,  and  they  sank  into  their 

places,  hot  and  humiliated  by  their  needless  tumult. 

13 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

As  they  cooled,  they  recovered  their  self-respect  and 
renewed  a  youthful  joy  in  some  of  the  long-estranged 
facts.  The  road  was  rougher  than  the  roads  at  home;  but 
for  much  less  money  they  had  the  comfort,  without  the 
unavailing  splendor,  of  a  Pullman  in  their  second-class 
carriage.  Mrs.  March  had  expected  to  be  used  with  the 
severity  on  the  imperial  railroads  which  she  had  failed  to 
experience  from  the  military  on  the  Hamburg  sidewalks, 
but  nothing  could  be  kindlier  than  the  whole  management 
toward  her.  Her  fellow-travelers  were  not  lavish  of  then* 
rights,  as  Americans  are;  what  they  got,  that  they  kept; 
and  in  the  run  from  Hamburg  to  Leipsic  she  had  several 
occasions  to  observe  that  no  German,  however  young  or 
robust,  dreams  of  offering  a  better  place,  if  he  has  one,  to 
a  lady  in  grace  to  her  sex  or  age;  if  they  got  into  a  carriage 
too  late  to  secure  a  forward-looking  seat,  she  rode  back- 
ward to  the  end  of  that  stage.  But  if  they  appealed  to 
their  fellow-travelers  for  information  about  changes, 
or  stops,  or  any  of  the  little  facts  that  they  wished  to 
make  sure  of,  they  were  enlightened  past  possibility  of 
error.  At  the  point  where  they  might  have  gone  wrong 
the  explanations  were  renewed  with  a  thoughtfulness 
which  showed  that  their  anxieties  had  not  been  forgotten. 

At  ten  o'clock,  after  she  had  ridden  backward  along  way, 
she  at  last,  within  an  hour  of  Leipsic,  had  got  a  seat  con- 
fronting March.  The  darkness  had  now  hidden  the  land- 
scape, but  the  impression  of  its  few  simple  elements  lingered 
pleasantly  in  their  sense:  long  levels,  densely  wooded  with 
the  precise,  severely  disciplined  German  forests,  and 
checkered  with  fields  of  grain  and  grass,  soaking  under 
the  thin  rain  that  from  time  to  time  varied  the  thin  sun- 
shine. The  villages  and  peasants'  cottages  were  notably 
few;  but  there  was  here  and  there  a  classic  or  a  Gothic 
villa,  which,  at  one  point,  an  English-speaking  young  lady 

turned  from  her  Tauchnitz  novel  to  explain  as  the  seat 

14 


LEIPSIC 

of  some  country  gentleman;  the  land  was  in  large  hold- 
ings, and  this  accounted  for  the  sparsity  of  villages  and 
cottages. 

At  Leipsic  as  in  a  spell  of  their  traveled  youth  they 
drove  up  through  the  town,  asleep  under  its  dimly  clouded 
sky,  and  silent  except  for  the  trolley-cars  that  prowled 
its  streets  with  their  feline  purr,  and  broke  at  times  into 
a  long,  shrill  caterwaul.  A  sense  of  the  past  imparted 
itself  to  the  familiar  encounter  with  the  portier  and  the 
head  waiter  at  the  hotel  door,  to  the  payment  of  the 
driver,  to  the  endeavor  of  the  secretary  to  have  them  take 
the  most  expensive  rooms  in  the  house,  and  to  his  com- 
promise upon  the  next  most,  where  they  found  themselves 
in  great  comfort,  with  electric  lights  and  bells,  and  a 
quick  succession  of  fee-taking  call-boys  in  dress-coats  too 
large  for  them. 

Their  windows,  as  they  saw  in  the  morning,  looked 
into  a  large  square  of  aristocratic  physiognomy,  and  of 
a  Parisian  effect  in  architecture,  which  afterward  proved 
characteristic  of  the  town,  if  not  quite  so  characteristic 
as  to  justify  the  passion  of  Leipsic  for  calling  itself  Little 
Paris.  The  prevailing  tone  was  of  a  gray  tending  to  the 
pale  yellow  of  the  Tauchnitz  editions  with  which  the 
place  is  more  familiarly  associated  in  the  minds  of  English- 
speaking  travelers.  It  was  rather  more  somber  than  it 
might  have  been  if  the  weather  had  been  fair;  but  a  quiet 
rain  was  falling  dreamily  that  morning,  and  the  square 
was  provided  with  a  fountain  which  continued  to  dribble 
in  the  rare  moments  when  the  rain  forgot  itself.  The  place 
was  better  shaded  than  need  be  in  that  sunless  land  by 
the  German  elms  that  look  like  ours,  and  it  was  sufficiently 
stocked  with  German  statues  that  look  like  no  others. 
It  had  a  monument,  too,  of  the  sort  with  which  German 
art  has  everywhere  disfigured  the  kindly  fatherland  since 

the  war  with  France.  It  is  not  for  the  victories  of  a  people 

15 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

that  any  other  people  can  care.  The  wars  come  and  go  in 
blood  and  tears;  but  whether  they  are  bad  wars,  or  what 
are  comically  called  good  wars,  they  are  of  one  effect  in 
death  and  sorrow,  and  fcheir  fame  is  an  offense  to  all  men 
not  concerned  in  them  till  time  has  softened  it  to  a  memory 

Of  old  unhappy,  far-off  things, 
And  battles  long  ago. 

It  was  for  some  such  reason  that  while  the  Marches 
turned  with  kistant  satiety  from  the  swelling  and  strut- 
ting sculpture  which  celebrated  the  Leipsic  heroes  of  the 
war  of  1870,  they  had  heart  for  those  of  the  war  of  1813; 
and  after  their  noonday  dinner  they  drove  willingly,  in  a 
pause  of  the  rain,  out  between  yellowing  harvests  of  wheat 
and  oats  to  the  field  where  Napoleon  was  beaten  by  the 
Russians,  Austrians,  and  Prussians  (it  always  took  at  least 
three  nations  to  beat  him)  fourscore  years  before.  March 
was  more  taken  with  the  notion  of  the  little  gardens 
which  his  guide  told  him  the  citizens  could  have  in  the 
suburbs  of  Leipsic  and  enjoy  at  any  trolley-car  distance 
from  their  homes.  He  saw  certain  of  these  gardens  in 
groups,  divided  by  low,  unenvious  fences,  and  sometimes 
furnished  with  summer-houses,  where  the  tenant  could 
take  his  pleasure  in  the  evening  air  with  his  family.  The 
guide  said  he  had  such  a  garden  himself,  at  a  rent  of  seven 
dollars  a  year,  where  he  raised  vegetables  and  flowers  and 
spent  his  peaceful  leisure;  and  March  fancied  that  on  the 
simple  domestic  side  of  their  life,  which  this  fact  gave  him 
a  glimpse  of,  the  Germans  were  much  more  engaging  than 
in  their  character  of  victors  over  either  the  First  or  the 
Third  Napoleon.  But  probably  they  would  not  have 
agreed  with  him,  and  probably  nations  will  go  on  making 
themselves  cruel  and  tiresome  till  humanity  at  last  pre- 
vails over  nationality. 

16 


LEIPSIC 

He  could  have  put  the  case  to  the  guide  himself;  but 
though  the  guide  was  imaginably  liberated  to  a  cosmo- 
politan conception  of  things  by  three  years'  service  as 
waiter  in  English  hotels,  where  he  learned  the  language, 
he  might  not  have  risen  to  this.  He  would  have  tried,  for 
he  was  a  willing  and  kindly  soul,  though  he  was  not  a 
valet  de  place  by  profession.  There  seemed,  in  fact,  but 
one  of  that  useless  and  amusing  race  left  in  Leipsic,  and 
this  one  was  engaged,  so  that  the  Marches  had  to  devolve 
upon  their  ex-waiter,  who  was  now  the  keeper  of  a  small 
restaurant.  He  gladly  abandoned  his  business  to  the  care 
of  his  wife,  in  order  to  drive  handsomely  about  in  his  best 
clothes,  with  strangers  who  did  not  exact  too  much  knowl- 
edge from  him.  The  madness  of  sightseeing,  which  spoils 
travel,  was  on  them,  and  they  delivered  themselves  up 
to  it  as  they  used  in  their  ignorant  youth,  though  now 
they  knew  its  futility  so  well.  They  spared  themselves 
nothing  that  they  had  time  for  that  day,  and  they  felt 
falsely  guilty  for  their  omissions,  as  if  they  really  had  been 
duties  to  art  and  history  which  must  be  discharged,  like 
obligations  to  one's  Maker  and  one's  neighbor.  They 
had  a  touch  of  genuine  joy  hi  the  presence  of  the  beauti- 
ful old  Rathhaus,  and  they  were  sensible  of  something 
like  a  genuine  emotion  hi  passing  the  famous  and  vener- 
able university;  the  very  air  of  Leipsic  is  redolent  of 
printing  and  publication,  which  appealed  to  March  in 
his  quality  of  editor;  and  they  could  not  fail  of  an  im- 
pression of  the  quiet  beauty  of  the  town,  with  its  regular 
streets'  of  houses  breaking  into  suburban  villas  of  an 
American  sort,  and  intersected  with  many  canals,  which 
in  the  intervals  of  the  rain  were  eagerly  navigated  by 
pleasure-boats,  and  contributed  to  the  general  picturesque- 
ness  by  their  frequent  bridges  even  during  the  drizzle. 
There  seemed  to  be  no  churches  to  do,  and  as  it  was  a 

Sunday  the  galleries  were  so  early  closed  against  them 

17 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

that  they  were  making  a  virtue  as  well  as  a  pleasure  of' 
the  famous  scene  of  Napoleon's  first  great  defeat. 

By  a  concert  between  their  guide  and  driver  their 
carriage  drew  up  at  the  little  inn  by  the  roadside,  which 
is  also  a  museum  stocked  with  relics  from  the  battle-field, 
and  with  objects  of  interest  relating  to  it.  Old  muskets, 
old  swords,  old  shoes,  and  old  coats,  trumpets,  drums, 
gun-carriages,  wheels,  helmets,  cannon-balls,  grape-shot, 
and  all  the  murderous  rubbish  which  battles  come  to  at 
last,  with  proclamations,  autographs,  caricatures  and  like- 
nesses of  Napoleon,  and  effigies  of  all  the  other  generals 
engaged,  and  miniatures  and  jewels  of  their  womenkind, 
filled  room  after  room,  through  which  their  owner  vaunted 
his  way,  with  a  loud  pounding  voice  and  a  bad  breath. 
When  he  wished  them  to  enjoy  some  gross  British  satire 
or  clumsy  German  gibe  at  Bonaparte's  expense,  and  put 
his  face  close  to  begin  the  laugh,  he  was  something  so 
terrible  that  March  left  the  place  with  a  profound  if  not  a 
reasoned  regret  that  the  French  had  not  won  the  battle 
of  Leipsic.  He  walked  away  musing  pensively  upon  the 
traveler's  inadequacy  to  the  ethics  of  history  when  a 
breath  could  so  sway  him  against  his  convictions;  but 
even  after  he  had  cleansed  his  lungs  with  some  deep  res- 
pirations he  found  himself  still  a  Bonapartist  in  the  pres- 
ence of  that  stone  on  the  rising  ground  where  Napoleon 
sat  to  watch  the  struggle  on  the  vast  plain,  and  see  his 
empire  slipping  through  his  blood-stained  fingers.  It  was 
with  difficulty  that  he  could  keep  from  revering  the  hat 
and  coat  which  are  sculptured  on  the  stone,  but  it  was 
well  that  he  succeeded,  for  he  could  not  make  out  then 
or  afterward  whether  the  habiliments  represented  were 
really  Napoleon's  or  not,  and  they  might  have  turned  out 
to  be  Barclay  de  Tolly's. 

They  parted  heart's  friends  with  their  ineffectual  guide, 
who  was  affectionately  grateful  for  the  few  marks  they 

18 


LEIPSIC 

gave  him  at  the  hotel  door;  and  they  were  in  just  the 
mood  to  hear  men  singing  in  a  farther  room  when  they 
went  down  to  supper.  The  waiter,  much  distracted  from 
their  own  service  by  his  duties  to  it,  told  them  it  was  the 
breakfast-party  of  students  which  they  had  heard  begin- 
ning there  about  noon.  The  revelers  had  now  been  some 
six  hours  at  table,  and  he  said  they  might  not  rise  before 
midnight;  they  had  just  got  to  the  toasts,  which  were 
apparently  set  to  music. 

The  students  of  right  remained  a  vivid  color  in  the  im- 
pression of  the  university  town.  They  pervaded  the  place, 
and  decorated  it  with  then-  fantastic  personal  taste  in 
coats  and  trousers,  as  well  as  their  corps-caps  of  green, 
white,  red,  and  blue,  but,  above  all,  blue.  They  were  not 
easily  distinguished  from  the  bicyclers  who  were  holding 
one  of  the  dull  festivals  of  their  kind  in  Leipsic  that  day, 
and  perhaps  they  were  sometimes  both  students  and 
bicyclers.  As  bicyclers  they  kept  about  in  the  rain,  which 
they  seemed  not  to  mind;  so  far  from  being  disheartened, 
they  had  spirits  enough  to  take  one  another  by  the  waist 
at  times  and  waltz  in  the  square  before  the  hotel.  At  one 
moment  of  the  holiday  some  chiefs  among  them  drove 
away  in  carriages;  at  supper  a  winner  of  prizes  sat  covered 
with  badges  and  medals;  another  who  went  by  the  hotel 
streamed  with  ribbons;  and  an  elderly  man  at  his  side 
was  bespattered  with  small  knots  and  ends  of  them,  as 
if  he  had  been  in  an  explosion  of  ribbons  somewhere.  It 
seemed  all  to  be  as  exciting  for  them,  and  it  was  as  tedious 
for  the  witnesses,  as  any  gala  of  students  and  bicyclers 
at  home. 

Mrs.  March  remained  with  an  unrequited  curiosity 
concerning  their  different  colors  and  different  caps,  and 
she  tried  to  make  her  husband  find  out  what  they  severally 
meant;  he  pretended  a  superior  interest  in  the  nature  of 

a  people  who  had  such  a  passion  for  uniforms  that  they 

19 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

were  not  content  with  its  gratification  in  their  immense 
army,  but  indulged  it  in  every  pleasure  and  employment 
of  civil  life.  He  estimated,  perhaps  not  very  accurately, 
that  only  one  man  out  of  ten  in  Germany  wore  citizen's 
dress;  and  among  all  functionaries  he  found  that  the  dogs 
of  the  women-and-dog  teams  alone  had  no  distinctive 
dress;  even  the  women  had  their  peasant  costume. 

There  was  an  industrial  fair  open  at  Leipsic  which  they 
went  out  of  the  city  to  see  after  supper,  along  with  a 
throng  of  Leipsickers,  whom  an  hour's  interval  of  fine 
weather  tempted  forth  on  the  trolley;  and  with  the  help 
of  a  little  corporal,  who  took  a  fee  for  his  service  with  the 
eagerness  of  a  civilian,  they  got  wheeled  chairs,  and  saw 
the  exposition  from  them.  This  was  not,  March  said, 
quite  the  same  as  being  drawn  by  a  woman-and-dog  team, 
which  would  have  been  the  right  means  of  doing  a  Ger- 
man fair;  but  it  was  something  to  have  his  chair  pushed 
by  a  slender  young  girl,  whose  stalwart  brother  applied 
his  strength  to  the  chair  of  the  lighter  traveler;  and  it 
was  fit  that  the  girl  should  reckon  the  common  hire,  while 
the  man  took  the  common  tip.  They  made  haste  to  leave 
the  useful  aspects  of  the  fair,  and  had  themselves  trundled 
away  to  the  Colonial  Exhibit. 

The  idea  of  her  colonial  progress  with  which  Germany 
is  trying  to  affect  the  home-keeping  imagination  of  her 
people  was  illustrated  by  an  encampment  of  savages  from 
her  Central-African  possessions.  They  were  getting  their 
supper  at  the  moment  the  Marches  saw  them,  and  were 
crouching,  half  naked,  around  the  fires  under  the  kettles, 
and  shivering  from  the  cold,  but  they  were  not  very 
characteristic  of  the  imperial  expansion,  unless  perhaps 
when  an  old  man  in  a  red  blanket  suddenly  sprang  up 
with  a  knife  in  his  hand  and  began  to  chase  a  boy  round 
the  camp.  The  boy  was  lighter-footed,  and  easily  outran 

the  sage,  who  tripped  at  times  on  his  blanket.    None  of 

20 


LEIPSIC 

the  other  Central-Africans  seemed  to  care  for  the  race, 
and  without  waiting  for  the  event,  the  American  specta- 
tors ordered  themselves  trundled  away  to  another  idle 
feature  of  the  fair,  where  they  hoped  to  amuse  themselves 
with  the  image  of  Old  Leipsic. 

This  was  so  faithfully  studied  from  the  past  in  its 
narrow  streets  and  Gothic  houses  that  it  was  almost  as 
picturesque  as  the  present  epoch  in  the  old  streets  of  Ham- 
burg. A  drama  had  just  begun  to  be  represented  on  a 
platform  of  the  public  square  in  front  of  a  fourteenth- 
century  beer-house,  with  people  talking  from  the  windows 
round,  and  revelers  in  the  costumes  of  the  period  drink- 
ing beer  and  eating  sausages  at  tables  in  the  open  air. 
Their  eating  and  drinking  were  genuine,  and  in  the  midst 
of  it  a  real  rain  began  to  pour  down  upon  them,  without 
affecting  them  any  more  than  if  they  had  been  Germans 
of  the  nineteenth  century.  But  it  drove  the  Americans  to 
a  shelter  from  which  they  could  not  see  the  play,  and  when 
it  held  up  they  made  their  way  back  to  their  hotel. 

Their  car  was  full  of  returning  pleasurers,  some  of  whom 
were  happy  beyond  the  sober  wont  of  the  fatherland. 
The  conductor  took  a  special  interest  in  his  tipsy  passen- 
gers, trying  to  keep  them  in  order,  and  genially  entreat- 
ing them  to  be  quiet  when  they  were  too  obstreperous. 
From  time  to  tune  he  got  some  of  them  off,  and  then,  when 
he  remounted  the  car,  he  appealed  to  the  remaining 
passengers  for  their  sympathy  with  an  innocent  smile, 
which  the  Americans,  still  strange  to  the  unjoyous  physi- 
ognomy of  the  German  Empire,  failed  to  value  at  its 
rare  worth. 

Before  he  slept  that  night  March  tried  to  assemble  from 
the  experiences  and  impressions  of  the  day  some  facts 
which  he  would  not  be  ashamed  of  as  a  serious  observer 
of  life  in  Leipsic,  and  he  remembered  that  their  guide  had 

said  house  rent  was  very  low.    He  generalized  from  the 
3  21 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

guide's  content  with  his  fee  that  the  Germans  were  not 
very  rapacious;  and  he  became  quite  irrelevantly  aware 
that  in  Germany  no  man's  clothes  fitted  him,  or  seemed 
expected  to  fit  him;  that  the  women  dressed  somewhat 
better,  and  were  rather  pretty  sometimes,  and  that 
they  had  feet  as  large  as  the  hearts  of  the  Germans  of 
every  age  and  sex  were  once  supposed  to  be.  He  was 
able  to  note,  rather  more  freshly,  that  with  all  their 
kindness  the  Germans  were  a  very  nervous  people,  if 
not  irritable,  and  at  the  least  cause  gave  way  to  an  agita- 
tion which  indeed  quickly  passed,  but  was  violent  while 
it  lasted.  Several  times  that  day  he  had  seen  encounters 
between  the  portier  and  guests  at  the  hotel  which  prom- 
ised violence,  but  which  ended  peacefully  as  soon  as  some 
simple  question  of  train-time  was  solved.  The  encounters 
always  left  the  portier  purple  and  perspiring,  as  any  agita- 
tion must  with  a  man  so  tight  in  his  livery.  He  bemoaned 
himself  after  one  of  them  as  the  victim  of  an  unhappy 
calling,  in  which  he  could  take  no  exercise.  "It  is  a  life  of 
excitements,  but  not  of  movements,"  he  explained,  and 
when  he  learned  where  March  was  going  he  regretted 
that  he  could  not  go  to  Carlsbad,  too. 

The  next  morning  was  so  fine  that  it  would  have  been 
a  fine  morning  in  America,  and  their  American  spirits  were 
as  light  as  the  gay  little  clouds  which  blew  about  in  the 
sky,  when  their  tram  drew  out  in  the  sunshine,  brilliant 
on  the  charming  landscape  all  the  way  to  Carlsbad. 

March  had  got  up  and  was  looking  out  of  the  window 
at  the  landscape,  which  had  not  grown  less  amiable  in 
growing  rather  more  slovenly  since  they  had  crossed  the 
Saxon  border  into  Bohemia.  All  the  morning  and  early 
afternoon  they  had  run  through  lovely  levels  of  harvest, 
where  men  were  cradling  the  wheat  and  women  were 
binding  it  into  sheaves  in  the  narrow  fields  between  black 

spaces  of  forest.     After  they  left  Eger  there  was  some- 

22 


LEIPSIC 

thing  more  picturesque  and  less  thrifty  in  the  farming 
among  the  low  hills  which  they  gradually  mounted  to  up- 
lands, where  they  tasted  a  mountain  quality  in  the  thin, 
pure  air.  The  railroad  stations  were  shabbier;  there  was 
an  indefinable  touch  of  something  Southern  in  the  scenery 
and  the  people.  Lilies  were  rocking  on  the  sluggish 
reaches  of  the  streams,  and  where  the  current  quickened 
tall  wheels  were  lifting  water  for  the  fields  in  circles  of 
brimming  and  spilling  pockets.  Along  the  embankments, 
where  a  new  track  was  being  laid,  barefooted  women  were 
at  work  with  pick  and  spade  and  barrow,  and  little  yellow- 
haired  girls  were  lugging  large  white-headed  babies  and 
watching  the  train  go  by.  At  an  up-grade  where  it  slowed 
in  the  ascent  he  began  to  throw  out  to  the  children  the 
pfennigs  which  had  been  left  over  from  his  stay  in  Ger- 
many, and  he  pleased  himself  with  his  bounty,  till  the 
question  whether  the  children  could  spend  the  money 
forced  itself  upon  him.  He  sat  down  feeling  less  like  a 
good  genius  than  a  cruel  magician  who  had  tricked  them 
with  false  wealth;  but  he  kept  his  remorse  to  himself, 
and  tried  to  interest  his  wife  in  the  difference  of  social 
and  civic  ideal  expressed  in  the  change  of  the  inhibitory 
notices  at  the  car  windows,  which  in  Germany  had  strong- 
liest  forbidden  him  to  outlean  himself,  and  now  in  Austria 
entreated  him  not  to  outbow  himself.  She  refused  to 
share  in  the  speculation,  or  to  debate  the  yet  nicer  problem 
involved  by  the  placarded  prayer  in  the  wash-room  to  the 
Messrs.  Travelers  not  to  take  away  the  soap;  and  sud- 
denly he  felt  himself  as  tired  as  she  looked,  with  that  sense 
of  the  futility  of  travel  which  lies  in  wait  for  every  one 
who  profits  by  travel. 


Ill 

CARLSBAD 

THE  long  drive  from  the  station  to  the  hotel  was  by 
streets  that  wound  down  the  hillside  like  those  of  an 
Italian  mountain  town,  between  gay  stuccoed  houses  of 
Southern  rather  than  of  Northern  architecture;  and  the 
impression  of  a  Latin  country  was  heightened  at  a  turn 
of  the  road  which  brought  into  view  a  colossal  crucifix 
planted  against  a  curtain  of  dark-green  foliage  on  the 
brow  of  one  of  the  wooded  heights  that  surrounded  Carls- 
bad. When  they  reached  the  level  of  the  Tepl,  the  hill- 
fed  torrent  that  brawls  through  the  little  city  under 
pretty  bridges  within  walls  of  solid  masonry,  they  found 
themselves  in  almost  the  only  vehicle  on  a  brilliant  prom- 
enade thronged  with  a  cosmopolitan  world.  Germans  in 
every  manner  of  misfit;  Polish  Jews  in  long  black  gabar- 
dines, with  tight,  corkscrew  curls  on  their  temples  under 
their  black-velvet  derbies;  Austrian  officers  in  tight  corsets; 
Greek  priests  in  flowing  robes  and  brimless  high  hats; 
Russians  in  caftans  and  Cossacks  in  Astrakhan  caps  ac- 
cented the  more  homogeneous  masses  of  western  Euro- 
peans, in  which  it  would  have  been  hard  so  say  which 
were  English,  French,  or  Italians.  Among  the  vividly 
dressed  ladies,  some  were  imaginably  Parisian  from  their 
chic  costumes,  but  they  might  easily  have  been  Hun- 
garians or  Levantines  of  taste;  some  Americans,  who 

might  have  passed  unknown  in  the  perfection  of  their 

24 


CARLSBAD 

dress,  gave  their  nationality  away  in  the  flat,  wooden 
tones  of  their  voices,  which  made  themselves  heard  above 
the  low  hum  of  talk  and  the  whisper  of  the  innumerable 
feet. 

The  omnibus  worked  its  way  at  a  slow  walk  among  the 
promenaders  going  and  coming  between  the  rows  of 
pollarded  locust-trees  on  one  side  and  the  bright  walls 
of  the  houses  on  the  other.  Under  the  trees  were  tables 
served  by  pretty,  bareheaded  girls  who  ran  to  and  from 
the  restaurants  across  the  way.  On  both  sides  flashed 
and  glittered  the  little  shops  full  of  silver,  glass,  jewelry, 
terra-cotta  figurines,  wood-carving,  and  all  the  idle  frip- 
pery of  watering-place  traffic.  They  suggested  Paris  and 
they  suggested  Saratoga,  and  then  they  were  of  Carlsbad 
and  of  no  place  else  in  the  world,  as  the  crowd  which 
might  have  been  that  of  other  cities  at  certain  moments 
could  only  have  been  of  Carlsbad  in  its  habitual  effect. 

The  hotel  where  they  finally  stopped  satisfied  Mrs. 
March  in  the  passion  for  size  which  is  at  the  bottom  of 
every  American  heart,  and  which  perhaps  above  all  else 
marks  us  the  youngest  of  the  peoples.  We  pride  ourselves 
on  the  bigness  of  our  own  things,  but  we  are  not  ungen- 
erous, and  when  we  go  to  Europe  and  find  things  bigger 
than  ours,  we  are  magnanimously  happy  in  them.  Pupp's, 
in  its  altogether  different  way,  was  larger  than  any  hotel 
at  Saratoga  or  at  Niagara;  and  when  told  that  it  some- 
times fed  fifteen  thousand  people  a  day  in  the  height  of 
the  season,  she  was  personally  proud  of  it. 

She  entered  with  impartial  intensity  into  the  fact  that 
the  elevator  at  Pupp's  had  the  characteristic  of  always 
coming  up  and  never  going  down  with  passengers.  It 
was  locked  into  its  closet  with  a  solid  door,  and  there 
was  no  bell  to  summon  it,  or  any  place  to  take  it  except 
on  the  ground-floor;  but  the  stairs  by  which  she  could 

descend  were  abundant  and   stately,  and  on  one  landing 

25 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

there  was  the  lithograph  of  one  of  the  largest  and  ugliest 
hotels  in  New  York;  how  ugly  it  was,  she  said,  she  should 
never  have  known  if  she  had  not  seen  it  there. 

The  dining-room  was  divided  into  the  grand  saloon, 
where  they  supped  amid  rococo  sculptures  and  frescoes, 
and  a  glazed  veranda  opening  by  vast  windows  on  a  spread 
of  tables  without,  which  were  already  filling  up  for  the 
evening  concert.  Around  them  at  the  different  tables  there 
were  groups  of  faces  and  figures  fascinating  in  then1  strange- 
ness, with  that  distinction  which  abashes  our  American 
level  in  the  presence  of  European  inequality. 

"How  simple  and  unimpressive  we  are,"  she  said, 
"beside  all  these  people!  I  used  to  feel  it  in  Europe  when 
I  was  young,  and  now  I'm  certain  that  we  must  seem  like 
two  faded-in  old  village  photographs.  We  don't  even 
look  intellectual!  I  hope  we  look  good." 

"I  know  I  do,"  said  March.  The  waiter  went  for  their 
supper,  and  they  joined  in  guessing  the  different  national- 
ities in  the  room.  A  French  party  was  easy  enough;  a 
Spanish  mother  and  daughter  were  not  difficult,  though 
whether  they  were  not  South-American  remained  un- 
certain; two  elderly  maiden  ladies  were  unmistakably 
of  central  Massachusetts,  and  were  obviously  of  a  book- 
club culture  that  had  left  no  leaf  unturned ;  some  Triestines 
gave  themselves  away  by  their  Venetian  accent;  but  a 
large  group  at  a  farther  table  were  unassignable  in  the 
strange  language  which  they  clattered  loudly  together, 
with  bursts  of  laughter.  They  were  a  family  party  of  old 
and  young,  they  were  having  a  good  time,  with  a  freedom 
which  she  called  baronial;  the  ladies  wore  white  satin 
or  black  lace,  but  the  men  were  in  sack-coats;  she  chose 
to  attribute  them,  for  no  reason  but  their  outlandishness, 
to  Transylvania.  March  pretended  to  prefer  a  table  full 
of  Germans,  who  were  unmistakably  bourgeois  and  yet 

of  intellectual  effect.    He  chose  as  his  favorite  a  middle- 

26 


CARLSBAD 

aged  man  of  learned  aspect,  and  they  both  decided  to 
think  of  him  as  the  Herr  Professor,  but  they  did  not  im- 
agine how  perfectly  the  title  fitted  him  till  he  drew  a. 
long  comb  from  his  waistcoat  pocket  and  combed  his 
hair  and  beard  with  it  above  the  table. 

The  next  morning  March  went  to  consult  one  of  the 
great  Carlsbad  doctors,  and  sat  long  with  a  company  of 
other  patients  in  his  anteroom.  When  it  came  his  turn 
to  be  prodded  and  kneaded  he  was  ashamed  at  being  told 
he  was  not  so  bad  a  case  as  he  had  dreaded.  The  doctor 
wrote  out  a  careful  dietary  for  him,  with  a  prescription 
of  a  certain  number  of  glasses  of  water  at  a  certain  spring 
and  a  certain  number  of  baths,  and  a  rule  for  the  walks 
he  was  to  take  before  and  after  eating;  then  the  doctor 
patted  hmi  on  the  shoulder  and  pushed  him  caressingly 
out  of  his  inner  office.  It  was  too  late  to  begin  his  treat- 
ment that  day,  but  he  went  with  his  wife  to  buy  a  cup, 
with  a  strap  for  hanging  it  over  his  shoulder,  and  he  put 
it  on  so  as  to  be  an  invalid  with  the  others  at  once;  he 
came  near  forgetting  the  small  napkin  of  Turkish  towel- 
ing which  they  stuffed  into  their  cups,  but,  happily,  the 
shopman  called  him  back  hi  time  to  sell  it  him. 

At  five  the  next  morning  he  rose,  and  on  his  way  to  the 
street  exchanged  with  the  servants  cleaning  the  hotel 
stairs  the  first  of  the  gloomy  Guten  Morgens  which  usher 
in  the  day  at  Carlsbad.  They  cannot  be  so  finally  hopeless 
as  they  sound;  they  are  probably  expressive  only  of  the 
popular  despair  of  getting  through  with  them  before 
night;  but  March  heard  the  salutation  sorrowfully  groaned 
out  on  every  hand  as  he  joined  the  straggling  current 
of  invalids  which  swelled  on  the  way  past  the  silent  shops 
and  cafe's  in  the  Alte  Wiese  till  it  filled  the  streets  and 
poured  its  thousands  upon  the  promenade  before  the 
classic  colonnade  of  the  Miihlbrunn.  On  the  other  bank. 

of  the  Tepl  the  Sprudel  flings  its  steaming  waters  by  irregu- 

27 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

lar  impulses  into  the  air  under  a  pavilion  of  iron  and  glass  ; 
but  the  Mtihlbrunn  is  the  source  of  most  resort.  There  is 
an  instrumental  concert  somewhere  in  Carlsbad  from 
early  rising  till  bedtime;  and  now  at  the  Miihlbrunn 
there  was  an  orchestra  already  playing;  and  under  the 
pillared  porch,  as  well  as  before  it,  the  multitude  shuffled 
up  and  down,  draining  their  cups  by  slow  sips,  and  then 
taking  each  his  place  in  the  interminable  line  moving  on 
to  replenish  them  at  the  spring. 

The  Polish  Jews,  whom  some  vice  of  their  climate  is 
said  peculiarly  to  fit  for  the  healing  effects  of  Carlsbad, 
most  took  his  eye  in  their  long  gabardines  of  rusty  black 
and  their  derby  hats  of  plush  or  velvet,  with  their  cork- 
screw curls  coming  down  before  their  ears.  They  were 
old  and  young,  they  were  grizzled  and  red  and  black,  but 
they  seemed  all  well-to-do;  and  what  impresses  one  first 
and  last  at  Carlsbad  is  that  its  waters  are  mainly  for  the 
healing  of  the  rich.  After  the  Polish  Jews,  the  Greek 
priests  of  Russian  race  were  the  most  striking  figures. 

There  were  types  of  Latin  ecclesiastics  who  were  strik- 
ing in  their  way,  too;  and  the  uniforms  of  certain  Austrian 
officers  and  soldiers  brightened  the  picture.  Here  and 
there  a  Southern  face,  Italian  or  Spanish  or  Levantine, 
looked  passionately  out  of  the  mass  of  dull  German  vis- 
ages; for  at  Carlsbad  the  Germans,  more  than  any  other 
Gentile  nation,  are  to  the  fore.  Their  misfits,  their  absence 
of  style,  imparted  the  prevalent  effect;  though  now  and 
then  among  the  women  a  Hungarian,  or  Pole,  or  Parisian, 
or  American  relieved  the  eye  which  seeks  beauty  and 
grace  rather  than  the  domestic  virtues.  There  were  cer- 
tain faces,  types  of  discomfort  and  disease,  which  appealed 
from  the  beginning  to  the  end.  A  young  Austrian,  yellow 
as  gold,  and  a  livid  South-American,  were  of  a  lasting 
fascination  to  March. 

What  most  troubled  him,  in  his  scrutiny  of  the  crowd, 

28 


CARLSBAD 

was  the  difficulty  of  assigning  people  to  their  respective 
nations,  and  he  accused  his  years  of  having  dulled  his 
perceptions;  but  perhaps  it  was  from  their  long  disuse  in 
his  homogeneous  American  world.  The  Americans  them- 
selves fused  with  the  European  races  who  were  often  so 
hard  to  make  out;  his  fellow-citizens  would  not  be  identi- 
fied till  their  bad  voices  gave  them  away;  he  thought 
the  women's  voices  the  worst. 

At  the  springs,  a  line  of  young  girls  with  a  steady  me- 
chanical action  dipped  the  cups  into  the  steaming  source 
and  passed  them  impersonally  up  to  their  owners.  With 
the  patients  at  the  Muhlbrunn  it  was  often  a  half -hour 
before  one's  turn  came,  and  at  all  a  strict  etiquette  for- 
bade any  attempt  to  anticipate  it.  The  water  was  merely 
warm  and  flat,  and  after  the  first  repulsion  one  could 
forget  it.  March  formed  a  childish  habit  of  counting  ten 
between  the  sips,  and  of  finishing  the  cup  with  a  gulp 
which  ended  it  quickly;  he  varied  his  walks  between  cups 
by  going  sometimes  to  a  bridge  at  the  end  of  the  colon- 
nade where  a  group  of  Triestines  were  talking  Venetian, 
and  sometimes  to  the  little  park  beyond  the  Kurhaus, 
where  some  old  women  were  sweeping  up  from  the  close 
sward  the  yellow  leaves  which  the  trees  had  untidily 
dropped  overnight.  He  liked  to  sit  there  and  look  at  the 
city  beyond  the  Tepl,  where  it  climbed  the  wooded  heights 
in  terraces  till  it  lost  its  houses  in  the  skirts  and  folds  of 
the  forests. 

The  earlier  usage  of  buying  the  delicate  pink  slices  of 
Westphalia  ham,  which  form  the  chief  motive  of  a  Carls- 
bad breakfast,  at  a  certain  shop  in  the  town,  and  carrying 
them  to  the  cafe*  with  you,  is  no  longer  of  such  binding 
force  as  the  custom  of  getting  your  bread  at  the  Swiss 
bakery.  You  choose  it  yourself  at  the  counter,  which 
begins  to  be  crowded  by  half  past  seven,  and  when  you 

have  collected  the  prescribed  loaves  into  the  basket  of 

29 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

metallic  filigree  given  you  by  one  of  the  baker's  maids, 
she  puts  them  into  a  tissue-paper  bag  of  a  gay  red  color, 
and  you  join  the  other  invalids  streaming  away  from  the 
bakery,  their  paper  bags  making  a  festive  rustling  as 
they  go. 

Two  roads  lead  out  of  the  town  into  the  lovely  meadow- 
lands,  a  good  mile  up  the  brawling  Tepl,  before  they  join 
on  the  right  side  of  the  torrent,  where  the  Posthof  Cafe" 
lurks  nestled  under  trees  whose  boughs  let  the  sun  and 
rain  impartially  through  upon  its  army  of  little  tables. 
By  this  time  the  slow  omnibus  plying  between  Carlsbad 
and  some  villages  in  the  valley  beyond  has  crossed  from 
the  left  bank  to  the  right,  and  keeps  on  past  half  a  dozen 
other  cafe's,  where  patients  whose  prescriptions  marshal 
them  beyond  the  Posthof  drop  off  by  the  dozens  and 
scores. 

The  road  on  the  left  bank  of  the  Tepl  is  wild  and  over- 
hung at  points  with  wooded  steeps,  when  it  leaves  the 
town;  but  on  the  right  it  is  bordered  with  shops  and  res- 
taurants a  great  part  of  its  length.  In  leafy  nooks  between 
these,  uphill  walks  begin  their  climb  of  the  mountains, 
from  the  foot  of  votive  shrines  set  round  with  tablets 
commemorating  in  German,  French,  Russian,  Hebrew, 
Magyar,  and  Czech  the  cure  of  high-well-borns  of  all 
those  races  and  languages.  Booths  glittering  with  the 
lapidary's  work  in  the  cheaper  gems,  or  full  of  the  ingen- 
ious figures  of  the  toy-makers,  alternate  with  the  shrines 
and  the  cafe's  on  the  way  to  the  Posthof,  and  with  their 
shoulders  against  the  overhanging  cliff,  spread  for  the 
passing  crowd  a  lure  of  Viennese  jewelry  in  garnets,  opals, 
amethysts,  and  the  like,  and  of  such  Bohemian  playthings 
as  carrot-eating  rabbits,  worsted-working  cats,  dancing- 
bears,  and  peacocks  that  strut  about  the  feet  of  the  passers 
and  expand  their  iridescent  tails  in  mimic  pride. 

They  were  at  the  gate  of  the  garden  and  grounds  of 

30 


CARLSBAD 

the  Posthof  at  last,  and  a  turn  of  the  path  brought  them 
to  the  prospect  of  its  tables,  under  the  trees,  between  the 
two  long  glazed  galleries  where  the  breakfasters  take 
refuge  at  other  tables  when  it  rains;  it  rains  nearly  always, 
and  the  trunks  of  the  trees  are  as  green  with  damp  as  if 
painted;  but  that  morning  the  sun  was  shining.  At  the 
verge  of  the  open  space  a  group  of  pretty  serving-maids, 
each  with  her  name  on  a  silver  band  pinned  upon  her 
breast,  met  them  and  bade  them  a  Guten  Morgen  of  al- 
most cheerful  note,  but  gave  way  to  an  eager  little 
smiling  blonde,  who  came  pushing  down  the  path. 

She  ran  among  the  tables  along  the  edge  of  the  western 
edge  of  the  gallery,  and  was  far  beyond  hearing  his  pro- 
test that  he  was  not  earlier  than  usual  when  she  beckoned 
him  to  the  table  she  had  found.  She  had  crowded  it  in 
between  two  belonging  to  other  girls,  and  by  the  time 
her  breakfasters  came  up  she  was  ready  for  their  order, 
with  the  pouting  pretense  that  the  girls  always  tried  to 
rob  her  of  the  best  places. 

The  breakfasters  had  been  thronging  into  the  grove 
and  the  galleries;  the  tables  were  already  filled,  and  men 
were  bringing  other  tables  on  their  heads  and  making 
places  for  them,  with  entreaties  for  pardon  everywhere; 
the  proprietor  was  anxiously  directing  them;  the  pretty 
serving-girls  were  running  to  and  from  the  kitchen 
in  a  building  apart  with  shrill,  sweet  promises  of  haste. 
The  morning  sun  fell  broken  through  the  leaves  on  the 
gay  hats  and  dresses  of  the  ladies,  and  dappled  the  figures 
of  the  men  with  harlequin  patches  of  light  and  shade. 

The  Germans'  notion  of  a  woodland  is  everywhere  that 
of  a  dense  forest  such  as  their  barbarous  tribes  primevally 
herded  in.  It  means  the  close-set  stems  of  trees,  with 
their  tops  interwoven  in  a  roof  of  boughs  and  leaves  so 
densely  that  you  may  walk  dry  through  it  almost  as  long 

as  a  German  shower  lasts.    When  the  sun  shines  there  is 

31 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

a  pleasant  greenish  light  in  the  aisles,  shot  here  and  there 
with  the  gold  that  trickles  through.  There  is  nothing  of 
the  accident  of  an  American  wood  in  these  forests,  which 
have  been  watched  and  weeded  by  man  ever  since  they 
burst  the  soil.  They  remain  nurseries,  but  they  have  the 
charm  which  no  human  care  can  alienate.  The  smell  of 
their  bark  and  their  leaves,  and  of  the  moist,  flowerless 
earth  about  their  roots,  came  to  March  where  he  sat  rich 
with  the  memories  of  his  country-bred  youth,  and  drugged 
all  consciousness  of  his  long  life  in  cities  since,  and  made 
him  a  part  of  nature,  with  dulled  interests  and  dimmed 
perspectives,  so  that  for  the  moment  he  had  the  enjoy- 
ment of  exemption  from  care.  There  was  no  wild  life  to 
penetrate  his  isolation;  no  birds,  not  a  squirrel,  not  an 
insect;  an  old  man  who  had  bidden  him  good  morning 
as  he  came  up  kept  fumbling  at  the  path  with  his  hoe 
and  was  less  intrusive  than  if  he  had  not  been  there. 

The  midday  dinner  at  Pupp's  was  the  time  to  see  the 
Carlsbad  world,  and  the  Marches  had  the  habit  of  sitting 
long  at  table  to  watch  it. 

There  was  one  family  in  whom  they  fancied  a  sort  of 
literary  quality,  as  if  they  had  come  out  of  some  pleasant 
German  story,  but  they  never  knew  anything  about  them. 
The  father  by  his  dress  must  have  been  a  Protestant 
clergyman;  the  mother  had  been  a  beauty  and  was  still 
very  handsome;  the  daughter  was  good-looking,  and  of 
good  breeding  which  was  both  girlish  and  ladylike.  They 
commended  themselves  by  always  taking  the  table  d'hdte 
dinner,  as  the  Marches  did,  and  eating  through  from  the 
soup  and  the  rank  fresh-water  fish  to  the  sweet  upon  the 
same  principle — the  husband  ate  all  the  compote  and  gave 
the  others  his  dessert,  which  was  not  good  for  him.  A 
young  girl  of  a  different  fascination  remained  as  much  a 
mystery.  She  was  small  and  of  an  extreme  tenuity,  which 

became  more  bewildering  as  she  advanced  through  her 

32 


CARLSBAD 

meal,  especially  at  supper,  which  she  made  of  a  long  cu- 
cumber pickle,  a  Frankfort  sausage  of  twice  the  pickle's 
length,  and  a  towering  goblet  of  beer;  in  her  lap  she  held 
a  shivering  little  hound;  she  was  in  the  decorous  keeping 
of  an  elderly  maid,  and  had  every  effect  of  being  a  gracious 
Fraulein.  A  curious  contrast  to  her  Teutonic  voracity  was 
the  temperance  of  a  young  Lathi  swell,  imaginably  from 
Trieste,  who  sat  long  over  his  small  coffee  and  cigarette, 
and  tranquilly  mused  upon  the  pages  of  an  Italian  news- 
paper. At  another  table  there  was  a  very  noisy  lady, 
short  and  fat,  in  flowing  draperies  of  white,  who  com- 
manded a  sallow  family  of  South-Americans,  and  loudly 
harangued  them  in  South-American  Spanish;  she  flared 
out  in  a  picture  which  nowhere  lacked  strong  effects; 
and  in  her  background  lurked  a  mysterious  black  figure, 
ironically  subservient  to  the  old  man,  the  mild  boy,  and 
the  pretty  young  girl  in  the  middle  distance  of  the 
family  group. 

Amid  the  shows  of  a  hardened  worldliness  there  were 
touching  glimpses  of  domesticity  and  heart;  a  young 
bride  fed  her  husband  soup  from  her  own  plate  with  her 
spoon,  unabashed  by  the  publicity;  a  mother  and  her 
two  pretty  daughters  hung  about  a  handsome  officer,  who 
must  have  been  newly  betrothed  to  one  of  the  girls;  and 
the  whole  family  showed  a  helpless  fondness  for  him, 
which  he  did  not  despise,  though  he  held  it  in  check;  the 
girls  dressed  alike,  and  seemed  to  have  for  their  whole 
change  of  costume  a  difference  from  time  to  time  in  the 
color  of  their  sleeves.  Carlsbad  was  evidently  one  of  the 
great  marriage  marts  of  middle  Europe,  where  mothers 
brought  their  daughters  to  be  admired,  and  everywhere 
the  flower  of  life  was  blooming  for  the  hand  of  love.  It 
blew  by  on  all  the  promenades  in  dresses  and  hats  as  pretty 
as  they  could  be  bought  or  imagined;  but  it  was  chiefly 

at  Pupp's  that  it  flourished.   For  the  most  part  it  seemed 

33 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

to  flourish  in  vain,  and  to  be  destined  to  be  put  by  for 
another  season  to  dream,  bulblike,  of  the  coming  summer 
in  the  quiet  of  Moldavian  and  Transylvanian  homes. 

The  worst  thing,  March  said,  would  be  the  lovers'  pre- 
tense of  being  interested  in  something  besides  them- 
selves, which  they  were  no  more  capable  of  than  so  many 
lunatics.  How  could  they  care  for  pretty  girls  playing 
tennis  on  an  upland  level  in  the  waning  afternoon?  Or 
a  cartful  of  peasant  women  stopping  to  cross  themselves 
at  a  wayside  shrine?  Or  a  whistling  boy  with  holes  hi 
his  trousers  pausing  from  some  wayside  raspberries  to 
touch  his  hat  and  say  good  morning?  Or  those  prepos- 
terous maidens  sprinkling  linen  on  the  grass  from  water- 
ing-pots while  the  skies  were  full  of  rain?  Or  that  black- 
smith shop  where  Peter  the  Great  made  a  horseshoe?  Or 
the  monument  of  the  young  warrior-poet  Koerner,  with 
a  gentle-looking  girl  and  her  mother  reading  and  knitting 
on  a  bench  before  it?  These  simple  pleasures  sufficed  him, 
but  what  could  lovers  really  care  for  them?  A  peasant 
girl  flung  down  on  the  grassy  roadside,  fast  asleep,  while 
her  yokefellow,  the  gray  old  dog,  lay  in  his  harness  near 
her,  with  one  drowsy  eye  half  open  for  her  and  the  other 
for  the  contents  of  their  cart;  a  boy  chasing  a  red  squirrel 
in  the  old  upper  town  beyond  the  Tepl,  and  enlisting  the 
interest  of  all  the  neighbors;  the  negro  doorkeeper  at  the 
Golden  Shield  who  ought  to  have  spoken  our  Southern 
English,  but  who  spoke  bad  German  and  was  from  Cairo; 
the  sweet  afternoon  stillness  in  the  woods;  the  good  Ger- 
man mothers  crocheting  at  the  Posthof  concerts — the 
lovers  could  care  for  none  of  these. 

A  day  or  two  after  Mrs.  March  went  with  her  husband 
to  revere  a  certain  magnificent  blackamoor  whom  he  had 
discovered  at  the  entrance  of  one  of  the  aristocratic  hotels 
on  the  Schlossberg,  performing  the  function  of  a  kind  of 

caryatid,  and  looking,  in  the  black  of  his  skin  and  the 

34 


CARLSBAD 

white  of  his  flowing  costume,  like  a  colossal  figure  carved 
in  ebony  and  ivory.  They  took  a  roundabout  way  through 
a  street  entirely  of  villa-pensions;  every  house  in  Carls- 
bad but  one  is  a  pension  if  it  is  not  a  hotel;  but  these  were 
of  a  sort  of  sentimental  prettiness,  with  each  a  little  garden 
before  it,  and  a  bower  with  an  iron  table  in  it  for  break- 
fasting and  supping  outdoors;  and  he  said  that  they 
would  be  the  very  places  for  bridal  couples  who  wished  to 
spend  the  honeymoon  in  getting  well  of  the  wedding  surfeit. 

There  were  several  kings  and  their  kindred  at  Carlsbad 
that  summer.  One  day  the  Duchess  of  Orleans  drove  over 
from  Marienbad,  attended  by  the  Duke  on  his  bicycle. 
After  luncheon,  they  reappeared  for  a  moment  before 
mounting  to  her  carriage  with  their  secretaries:  two  young 
French  gentlemen  whose  dress  and  bearing  better  satis- 
fied Mrs.  March's  exacting  passion  for  an  aristocratic  air 
in  then*  order.  The  Duke  was  fat  and  fair,  as  a  Bourbon 
should  be,  and  the  Duchess  fatter,  though  not  so  fair, 
as  became  a  Hapsburg,  but  they  were  both  more  plebeian- 
looking  than  their  retainers,  who  were  slender  as  well  as 
young,  and  as  perfectly  appointed  as  English  tailors  could 
imagine  them. 

The  King  of  Serbia  came  a  few  days  after  the  Duke 
and  Duchess,  but  he  was  such  a  young  King,  and  of  such 
a  little  country.  They  watched  for  him  from  the  windows 
of  the  reading-room,  while  the  crowd  outside  stood  six 
deep  on  the  three  sides  of  the  square  before  the  hotel,  and 
two  plain  public  carriages  which  brought  the  King  and 
his  suite  drew  tamely  up  at  the  portal,  where  the  pro- 
prietor and  some  civic  dignitaries  received  him.  His 
moderate  approach,  so  little  like  that  of  royalty  on  the 
stage,  to  which  Americans  are  used,  allowed  Mrs.  March 
to  make  sure  of  the  pale,  slight,  insignificant,  amiable- 
looking  youth  in  spectacles  as  the  sovereign  she  was  am- 
buscading. Then  no  appeal  to  her  principles  could  keep 

35 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

her  from  peeping  through  the  reading-room  door  into 
the  rotunda,  where  the  King  graciously  but  speedily  dis- 
missed the  civic  gentlemen  and  the  proprietor,  and  van- 
ished into  the  elevator.  She  was  destined  to  see  him  so 
often  afterward  that  she  scarcely  took  the  trouble  to  time 
her  dining  and  supping  by  that  of  the  simple  potentate, 
who  had  his  meals  in  one  of  the  public  rooms,  with  three 
gentlemen  of  his  suite,  in  sack-coats  like  himself,  after 
the  informal  manner  of  the  place. 

There  are  few  prettier  things  than  Carlsbad  by  night 
from  one  of  the  many  bridges  which  span  the  Tepl  in  its 
course  through  the  town.  If  it  is  a  starry  night,  the  tor- 
rent glides  swiftly  away  with  an  inverted  firmament  in  its 
bosom,  to  which  the  lamps  along  its  shores  and  in  the 
houses  on  either  side  contribute  a  planetary  splendor  of 
their  own.  By  nine  o'clock  everything  is  hushed;  not  a 
wheel  is  heard  at  that  dead  hour;  the  few  feet  shuffling 
stealthily  through  the  Alte  Wiese  whisper  caution  of 
silence  to  those  issuing  with  a  less  guarded  tread  from  the 
opera;  the  little  bowers  that  overhang  the  stream  are  as 
dark  and  mute  as  the  restaurants  across  the  way  which 
serve  meals  in  them  by  day;  the  whole  place  is  as  forsaken 
as  other  cities  at  midnight.  People  get  quickly  home  to 
bed,  or,  if  they  have  a  mind  to  snatch  a  belated  joy,  they 
slip  into  the  Theater-Cafe',  where  the  sleepy  Frauleins 
serve  them,  in  an  exemplary  drowse,  with  plates  of  cold 
ham  and  bottles  of  the  gently  gaseous  waters  of  Giesshiibl. 
Few  are  of  the  bold  badness  which  delights  in  a  supper  at 
Schwarzhopf's,  and  even  these  are  glad  of  the  drawn 
curtains  which  hide  their  orgy  from  the  chance  passer. 

One  day  their  carriage  climbed  from  Carlsbad  in  long 
irregular  curves  to  the  breezy  upland  where  the  great 
highroad  to  Prague  ran  through  fields  of  harvest.  They 
had  come  by  heights  and  slopes  of  forest,  where  the  serried 

stems  of  the  tall  firs  showed  brown  and  whitish-blue  and 

36 


CARLSBAD 

grew  straight  as  stalks  of  grain;  and  now  on  either  side 
the  farms  opened  under  a  sky  of  unwonted  cloudlessness. 
Narrow  strips  of  wheat  and  rye,  which  the  men  were 
cutting  with  sickles,  and  the  women  in  red  bodices  were 
binding,  alternated  with  ribbons  of  yellowing  oats  and 
grass,  and  breadths  of  beets  and  turnips,  with  now  and 
then  lengths  of  plowed  land.  In  the  meadows  the  peas- 
ants were  piling  their  carts  with  heavy  rowen,  the  girls 
lifting  the  hay  on  the  forks,  and  the  men  giving  them- 
selves the  lighter  labor  of  ordering  the  load.  From  the  up- 
turned earth,  where  there  ought  to  have  been  troops  of 
strutting  crows,  a  few  somber  ravens  rose.  But  they  could 
not  rob  the  scene  of  its  gaiety;  it  smiled  in  the  sunshine 
with  colors  which  vividly  followed  the  slope  of  the  land 
till  they  were  dimmed  in  the  forests  on  the  far-off  moun- 
tains. Nearer  and  farther,  the  cottages  and  villages  shone 
in  the  valleys,  or  glimmered  through  the  veils  of  the  dis- 
tant haze.  Over  all  breathed  the  keen,  pure  air  of  the  hills, 
with  a  sentiment  of  changeless  eld. 

It  was  full  summer,  as  it  is  everywhere  in  mid-August, 
but  at  Carlsbad  the  sun  was  so  late  getting  up  over  the 
hills  that  as  people  went  to  their  breakfasts  at  the  cafe" 
up  the  valley  of  the  Tepl  they  found  him  looking  very 
obliquely  into  it  at  eight  o'clock  in  the  morning.  The 
yellow  leaves  were  thicker  about  the  feet  of  the  trees,  and 
the  grass  was  silvery  gray  with  the  belated  dews.  The 
breakfasters  were  fewer  than  they  had  been,  and  there 
were  more  little  barefooted  boys  and  girls  with  cups  of 
red  raspberries  which  they  offered  to  the  passers  with 
cries  of  "Himbeeren!  Himbeeren!"  plaintive  as  the  notes 
of  birds  left  songless  by  the  receding  summer.  With  the 
receding  summer  March's  cure  had  come  to  an  end,  and 
the  question  of  his  after-cure  had  been  decided  by  his 
good  doctor  as  a  matter  of  personal  taste.  "Go  where 

you  like,"  he  said,  "for  another  month  before  you  go 
4  37 

360002 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

home,  and  when  you  come  back  to  Europe  come  back  to 
Carlsbad."  He  had  not  exacted  a  specific  resort  to  this  cli- 
mate or  that,  but  had  advised  only  against  traveling  too 
hard  in  any  particular  direction,  and  his  advice  left  them 
free  to  indulge  the  fancy  for  German  travel  which  they 
had  long  cherished. 

Mrs.  March  had  decided  not  to  go  to  the  Posthof  for 
their  last  breakfast,  where  they  had  already  taken  a  lavish 
leave  of  their  eager  waitress,  with  a  sense  of  being  prompt- 
ly superseded  in  her  affections.  They  found  a  place  in 
the  red-table-cloth  end  of  the  pavilion  at  Pupp's,  and  were 
served  by  the  pretty  girl  with  the  rosebud  mouth  whom 
they  had  known  only  as  Ein-und-Zwanzig,  and  whose 
promise  of  "Komm'  gleich,  bitte  schon!"  was  like  a  bird's 
note,  and  never  had  the  coffee  been  so  good,  the  bread  so 
aerially  light,  the  Westphalian  ham  so  tenderly  pink. 

They  had  been  obliged  to  take  the  secretary  of  the 
hotel  into  their  confidence,  in  the  process  of  paying  their 
bill.  He  put  on  his  high  hat  and  came  out  to  see  them  off. 
The  portier  was  already  there,  standing  at  the  step  of  the 
lordly  two-spanner  which  they  had  ordered  for  the  long 
drive  to  the  station.  The  Swiss  elevator-man  came  to 
the  door  to  offer  them  a  fellow-republican's  good  wishes 
for  their  journey;  Herr  Pupp  himself  appeared  at  the 
last  moment  to  hope  for  their  return  another  summer. 
Mrs.  March  bent  a  last  look  of  interest  upon  the  proprie- 
tor as  their  two-spanner  whirled  away. 

"They  say  that  he  is  going  to  be  made  a  count." 

"Well,  I  don't  object,"  said  March.  "'A  man  who  can 
feed  fourteen  thousand  people,  mostly  Germans,  in  a  day 
ought  to  be  made  an  archduke." 


IV 

NUREMBERG 

AT  Eger  they  had  a  memorable  dinner,  with  so  much 
leisure  for  it  that  they  could  form  a  lifelong  friend- 
ship for  the  old  English-speaking  waiter  who  served  them 
and  would  not  suffer  them  to  hurry  themselves.  The  hills 
had  already  fallen  away,  and  they  ran  along  through  a 
cheerful  country,  with  tracts  of  forests  under  white  clouds 
blowing  about  in  a  blue  sky,  and  gaily  flinging  their 
shadows  down  upon  the  brown  plowed  land,  and  upon 
the  yellow  oatfields,  where  women  were  cutting  the 
leisurely  harvest  with  sickles,  and  where  once  a  great  girl 
with  swarthy  bare  arms  unbent  herself  from  her  toil  and 
rose,  a  statue  of  rude  vigor  and  beauty,  to  watch  them  go 
by.  Hedges  of  evergreen  inclosed  the  yellow  oatfields, 
where  slow  wagons  paused  to  gather  the  sheaves  of  the 
week  before,  and  then  loitered  away  with  them.  Flocks 
of  geese  waddled  in  sculpturesque  relief  against  the  close- 
cropped  pastures  herded  by  little  girls  with  flaxen  pig- 
tails, whose  eyes,  blue  as  corn-flowers,  followed  the  flying 
train.  There  were  stretches  of  wild  thyme  purpling  long- 
barren  acreages,  and  growing  up  the  railroad  banks  almost 
to  the  rails  themselves.  From  the  meadows  the  rowen, 
tossed  in  long,  loose  windrows,  sent  into  then*  car  a  sad  au- 
tumnal fragrance  which  mingled  with  the  tobacco  smoke, 
when  two  fat  smokers  emerged  into  the  narrow  corridor 
outside  their  compartments  and  tried  to  pass  each  other. 
Their  vast  stomachs  beat  together  in  a  vain  encounter. 

39 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

"Zu  eng!"  said  one,  and,"«7<z,  zu  eng!"  said  the  other, 
and  they  laughed  innocently  in  each  other's  faces,  with 
a  joy  in  their  recognition  of  the  corridor's  narrowness  as 
great  as  if  it  had  been  a  stroke  of  the  finest  wit. 

All  the  way  the  land  was  lovely,  and  as  they  drew  near 
Nuremberg  it  grew  enchanting,  with  a  fairy  quaintness. 
The  scenery  was  Alpine,  but  the  scale  was  toylike,  as 
befitted  the  region,  and  the  mimic  peaks  and  valleys  with 
green  brooks  gushing  between  them,  and  strange  rock 
forms  recurring  in  endless  caprice  seemed  the  home  of 
children's  story.  All  the  gnomes  and  elves  might  have 
dwelt  there  in  peaceful  fellowship  with  the  peasants  who 
plowed  the  little  fields,  and  gathered  the  garlanded  hops, 
and  lived  in  the  farmsteads  and  village  houses  with  those 
high,  timber-laced  gables. 

The  spell  which  began  here  was  not  really  broken  by 
anything  that  afterward  happened  in  Nuremberg,  though 
the  old  toy-capital  was  trolley-wired  through  all  its 
quaintness,  and  they  were  lodged  in  a  hotel  lighted  by 
electricity  and  heated  by  steam,  and  equipped  with  an 
elevator  which  was  so  modern  that  it  came  down  with 
them  as  well  as  went  up.  All  the  things  that  assumed  to 
be  of  recent  structure  or  invention  were  as  nothing  against 
the  dense  past,  which  overwhelmed  them  with  the  sense 
of  a  world  elsewhere  outlived.  In  Nuremberg  it  is  not 
the  quaint  or  the  picturesque  that  is  exceptional;  it  is 
the  matter-of-fact  and  the  commonplace.  Here,  »more 
than  anywhere  else,  you  are  steeped  in  the  Gothic  spirit 
which  expresses  itself  in  a  Teutonic  dialect  of  homely 
sweetness,  of  endearing  caprice,  of  rude  grotesqueness, 
but  of  positive  grace  and  beauty  almost  never.  It  is  the 
architectural  speech  of  a  strenuous,  gross,  kindly,  honest 
people's  fancy;  such  as  it  is  it  was  inexhaustible,  and  such 
as  it  is  it  was  bewitching  for  the  travelers. 

They  could  hardly  wait  till  they  had  supper  before 

40 


NUREMBERG 

plunging  into  the  ancient  town,  and  they  took  the  first 
tram-car  at  a  venture.  It  was  a  sort  of  transfer,  drawn  by 
horses,  which  delivered  them  a  little  inside  of  the  city 
gate  to  a  trolley-car.  The  conductor  with  their  fare  de- 
manded then*  destination;  March  frankly  owned  that 
they  did  not  know  where  they  wanted  to  go;  they  wanted 
to  go  anywhere  the  conductor  chose;  and  the  conductor, 
after  reflection,  decided  to  put  them  down  at  the  public 
garden,  which,  as  one  of  the  newest  things  in  the  city, 
would  make  the  most  favorable  impression  upon  stran- 
gers. It  was,  in  fact,  so  like  all  other  city  gardens,  with  the 
foliage  of  its  trimly  planted  alleys,  that  it  sheltered  them 
effectually  from  the  picturesqueness  of  Nuremberg,  and 
they  had  a  long,  peaceful  hour  on  one  of  its  benches, 
where  they  rested  from  their  journey,  and  repented  their 
hasty  attempt  to  appropriate  the  charm  of  the  city. 

The  next  morning  it  rained,  according  to  a  custom 
which  the  elevator-boy  (flown  with  the  insolent  recollec- 
tion of  a  sunny  summer  in  Milan)  said  was  invariable  in 
Nuremberg;  but  after  the  one-o'clock  table  d'hdte  they 
took  a  noble  two-spanner  carriage  and  drove  all  round  the 
city.  Everywhere  the  ancient  moat,  thickly  turfed  and 
planted  with  trees  and  shrubs,  stretched  a  girdle  of  garden 
between  their  course  and  the  wall  beautifully  old,  with 
knots  of  dead  ivy  clinging  to  its  crevices,  or  broad 
meshes  of  the  shining  foliage  mantling  its  blackened  ma- 
sonry. A  tile-roofed  open  gallery  ran  along  the  top,  where 
so  many  centuries  of  sentries  had  paced,  and  arched  the 
massive  gates  with  heavily  molded  piers,  where  so  count- 
lessly  the  fierce  burgher  troops  had  sallied  forth  against 
their  besiegers,  and  so  often  the  leaguer  hosts  had  dashed 
themselves  in  assault.  The  blood  shed  in  forgotten  battles 
would  have  flooded  the  moat  where  now  the  grass  and 
flowers  grew,  or  here  and  there  a  peaceful  stretch  Df  water 
stagnated. 

41 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

The  drive  ended  in  a  visit  to  the  old  Burg  where  the 
Hapsburg  Kaisers  dwelt  when  they  visited  their  faithful 
imperial  city.  From  its  ramparts  the  incredible  pictu- 
resqueness  of  Nuremberg  best  shows  itself,  and  if  one  has 
any  love  for  the  distinctive  quality  of  Teutonic  architect- 
ure it  is  here  that  more  than  anywhere  else  one  may  feast 
it.  The  prospect  of  tower  and  spire  and  gable  is  of  such  a 
medieval  richness,  of  such  an  abounding  fullness,  that  all 
incidents  are  lost  in  it.  The  multitudinous  roofs  of  red- 
brown  tiles,  blinking  drowsily  from  their  low  dormers, 
press  upon  one  another  in  endless  succession;  they  cluster 
together  on  a  rise  of  ground  and  sink  away  where  the 
street  falls,  but  they  nowhere  disperse  or  scatter,  and  they 
end  abruptly  at  the  other  rim  of  the  city,  beyond  which 
looms  the  green  country,  merging  in  the  remoter  blue  of 
misty  uplands. 

A  pretty  young  girl  waited  at  the  door  of  the  tower  for 
the  visitors  to  gather  in  sufficient  number,  and  then  led 
them  through  the  terrible  museum,  descanting  in  the 
same  gay  voice  and  with  the  same  smiling  air  on  all  the 
murderous  engines  and  implements  of  torture.  First  in 
German  and  then  in  English  she  explained  the  fearful 
uses  of  the  Iron  Maiden,  she  winningly  illustrated  the 
action  of  the  racks  and  wheels  on  which  men  had  been 
stretched  and  broken,  and  she  sweetly  vaunted  a  sword 
which  had  beheaded  eight  hundred  persons.  When  she 
took  the  established  fee  from  March  she  suggested,  with 
a  demure  glance,  "And  what  more  you  please  for  saying 
it  in  English." 

"Can  you  say  it  in  Russian?"  demanded  a  young  man, 
whose  eyes  had  been  dwelling  on  her  from  the  beginning. 
She  laughed  archly,  and  responded  with  some  Slavic 
words,  and  then  delivered  her  train  of  sightseers  over  to 
the  custodian,  who  was  to  show  them  through  the  halls 

and  chambers  of  the  Burg.    These  were  undergoing  the 

42 


NUREMBERG 

repairs  which  the  monuments  of  the  past  are  perpetually 
suffering  in  the  present,  and  there  was  some  special  paint- 
ing and  varnishing  for  the  reception  of  the  Kaiser,  who 
was  coming  to  Nuremberg  for  the  military  maneuvers  then 
at  hand.  But  if  they  had  been  in  the  unmolested  discom- 
fort of  their  unlivable  magnificence,  their  splendor  was 
such  as  might  well  reconcile  the  witness  to  the  superior 
comfort  of  a  private  station  in  our  snugger  day.  The 
Marches  came  out  owning  that  the  youth  which  might 
once  have  found  the  romantic  glories  of  the  place  enough 
was  gone  from  them.  But  so  much  of  it  was  left  to  her 
that  she  wished  to  make  him  stop  and  look  at  the  flirta- 
tion which  had  blossomed  out  between  that  pretty  custodian 
and  the  Russian,  whom  they  had  scarcely  missed  from 
their  party  in  the  Burg.  He  had  apparently  never  parted 
from  the  girl,  and  now,  as  they  sat  together  on  the  thresh- 
old of  the  gloomy  tower,  he  must  have  been  teaching  her 
more  Slavic  words,  for  they  were  both  laughing  as  if  they 
understood  each  other  perfectly. 

In  his  security  from  having  the  affair  in  any  wise  on  his 
hands,  March  would  have  willingly  lingered  to  see  how 
her  education  got  on;  but  it  began  to  rain.  The  rain  did 
not  disturb  the  lovers,  but  it  obliged  the  elderly  spectators 
to  take  refuge  in  their  carriage;  and  they  drove  off  to 
find  the  famous  Little  Goose  Man.  This  is  what  every  one 
does  at  Nuremberg;  it  would  be  difficult  to  say  why. 
When  they  found  the  Little  Goose  Man,  he  was  only  a 
medieval  fancy  in  bronze,  who  stood  on  his  pedestal  in 
the  market-place  and  contributed  from  the  bill  of  the  goose 
under  his  arm  a  small  stream  to  the  rainfall  drenching 
the  wet  wares  of  the  wet  market-women  round  the  foun- 
tain, and  soaking  their  cauliflowers  and  lettuce,  then* 
grapes  and  pears,  their  carrots  and  turnips,  to  the  watery 
flavor  of  all  the  fruits  and  vegetables  in  Germany. 

The  air  was  very  raw  and  chill;   but  after  supper  the 

43 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

clouds  cleared  away,  and  a  pleasant  evening  tempted  the 
travelers  out.  The  portier  dissembled  any  slight  which 
their  eagerness  for  the  only  amusement  he  could  think  of 
inspired,  and  directed  them  to  a  popular  theater  which 
was  giving  a  summer  season  at  low  prices  to  the  lower 
classes,  and  which  they  surprised,  after  some  search,  try- 
ing to  hide  itself  in  a  sort  of  back  square.  They  got  the 
best  places  at  a  price  which  ought  to  have  been  mortify- 
ingly  cheap,  and  found  themselves,  with  a  thousand  harm- 
less bourgeois  folk,  in  a  sort  of  spacious,  agreeable  barn, 
of  a  decoration  by  no  means  ugly,  and  of  a  certain  artless 
comfort.  Each  seat  fronted  a  shelf  at  the  back  of  the  seat 
before  it,  where  the  spectator  could  put  his  hat;  there 
was  a  smaller  shelf  for  his  Stein  of  the  beer  passed  constant- 
ly throughout  the  evening;  and  there  was  a  buffet  where 
he  could  stay  himself  with  cold  ham  and  other  robust 
German  refreshments. 

When  they  came  out  of  the  theater  it  was  not  raining; 
the  night  was  as  brilliantly  starlit  as  a  night  could  be  in 
Germany,  and  they  sauntered  home  richly  content  through 
the  narrow  streets  and  through  the  beautiful  old  Damen- 
thor,  beyond  which  their  hotel  lay.  How  pretty,  they  said, 
to  call  that  charming  port  the  Ladies'  Gate!  They  prom- 
ised one  another  to  find  out  why,  and  they  never  did  so, 
but  satisfied  themselves  by  assigning  it  to  the  exclusive 
use  of  the  slim  maidens  and  massive  matrons  of  the  old 
Nuremberg  patriciate,  whom  they  imagined  trailing  their 
silken  splendors  under  its  arch  in  perpetual  procession. 

The  life  of  the  Nuremberg  patriciate,  now  extinct  in 
the  control  of  the  city  which  it  builded  so  strenuously 
and  maintained  so  heroically,  is  still  insistent  in  all  its  art. 
This  expresses  their  pride  at  once,  and  then-  simplicity 
with  a  childish  literality.  At  its  best,  it  is  never  so  good  as 
the  good  Italian  art,  whose  influence  is  always  present  in 
its  best.  The  coloring  of  the  great  canvases  is  Venetian, 

44 


NUREMBERG 

but  there  is  no  such  democracy  of  greatness  as  in  the 
painting  at  Venice;  in  decoration  the  art  of  Nuremberg 
is  at  best  quaint,  and  at  the  worst  puerile.  Wherever  it 
had  obeyed  an  academic  intention  it  seemed  to  March 
poor  and  coarse,  as  in  the  bronze  fountain  beside  the 
Church  of  St.  Lawrence.  The  water  spurts  from  the  pouted 
breasts  of  the  beautiful  figures  in  streams  that  cross  and 
interlace  after  a  fancy  trivial  and  gross;  but  in  the  base  of 
the  church  there  is  a  time-worn  Gethsemane,  exquisitely 
affecting  in  its  simple-hearted  truth.  The  long  ages  have 
made  it  even  more  affecting  than  the  sculptor  imagined 
it;  they  have  blurred  the  faces  and  figures  in  passing  till 
their  features  are  scarcely  distinguishable;  and  the  sleep- 
ing apostles  seem  to  have  dreamed  themselves  back  into 
the  mother-marble.  It  is  of  the  same  tradition  and  im- 
pulse with  that  supreme  glory  of  the  native  sculpture,  the 
ineffable  tabernacle  of  Adam  Krafft,  which  climbs  a  col- 
umn of  the  church  within,  a  miracle  of  richly  carven  story; 
and  no  doubt  if  there  were  a  Nuremberg  sculptor  doing 
great  things  to-day  his  work  would  be  of  kindred  inspira- 
tion. 

The  descendants  of  the  old  patrician  who  ordered  the 
tabernacle  at  rather  a  hard  bargain  from  the  artist  still 
worship  on  the  floor  below,  and  the  descendants  of  his 
neighbor  patricians  have  their  seats  in  the  pews  about, 
and  then-  names  cut  in  the  proprietary  plates  on  the  pew- 
tops.  The  vergeress  who  showed  the  Marches  through 
the  church  was  devout  in  the  praise  of  these  aristocratic 
fellow-citizens  of  hers.  "So  simple,  and  yet  so  noble!" 
she  said.  She  was  a  very  romantic  vergeress,  and  she  told 
them  at  unsparing  length  the  legend  of  the  tabernacle: 
how  the  artist  fell  asleep  in  despair  of  winning  his  patron's 
daughter,  and  saw  in  a  vision  the  master-work,  with  the 
lily-like  droop  at  top,  which  gamed  him  her  hand.  They 

did  not  realize  till  too  late  that  it  was  all  out  of  a  novel 

45 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

of  Georg  Ebers's,  but  added  to  the  regular  fee  for  the 
church  a  gift  worthy  of  an  inedited  legend. 

Even  then  they  had  a  pleasure  in  her  enthusiasm  rarely 
imparted  by  the  Nuremberg  manner.  They  missed  there 
the  constant,  sweet  civility  of  Carlsbad,  and  found  them- 
selves falling  flat  in  their  endeavers  for  a  little  cordiality. 
They,  indeed,  inspired  with  some  kindness  the  old  woman 
who  showed  them  through  that  cemetery  where  Albrecht 
Diirer  and  Hans  Sachs  and  many  other  illustrious  citizens 
lie  buried  under  monumental  brasses  of  such  beauty 

That  kings,  to  have  the  like,  might  wish  to  die. 

But  this  must  have  been  because  they  abandoned  them- 
selves so  willingly  to  the  fascination  of  the  bronze  skull 
on  the  tomb  of  a  fourteenth-century  patrician,  which  had 
the  uncommon  advantage  of  a  lower  jaw  hinged  to  the 
upper.  She  proudly  clapped  it  up  and  down  for  their 
astonishment,  and  waited,  with  a  toothless  smile,  to  let 
them  discover  the  head  of  a  nail  artfully  figured  in  the 
skull;  then  she  gave  a  shrill  cackle  of  joy,  and  gleefully 
explained  that  the  wife  of  this  patrician  had  killed  him 
by  driving  a  nail  into  his  temple  and  had  been  fitly  be- 
headed for  the  murder. 

She  cared  so  much  for  nothing  else  in  the  cemetery,  but 
she  consented  to  let  them  wonder  at  the  richness  of  the 
sculpture  in  the  level  tombs,  with  their  escutcheons  and 
memorial  tablets  overrun  by  the  long  grass  and  the 
matted  ivy;  she  even  consented  to  share  their  indigna- 
tion at  the  destruction  of  some  of  the  brasses  and  the 
theft  of  others.  She  suffered  more  reluctantly  their  ten- 
derness for  the  old,  old  crucifixion  figured  in  sculpture  at 
one  corner  of  the  cemetery,  where  the  anguish  of  the 
Christ  had  long  since  faded  into  the  stone  from  which  it 

had  been  evoked,  and  the  thieves  were  no  longer  dis- 

46 


NUREMBERG 

tinguishable  in  their  penitence  or  impenitence;  but  she 
parted  friends  with  them  when  she  saw  how  much  they 
seemed  taken  with  the  votive  chapel  of  the  noble  Holz- 
schuh  family,  where  a  line  of  wooden  shoes  puns  upon  the 
name  in  the  frieze,  like  the  line  of  dogs  which  chase  one 
another,  with  bones  in  their  mouths,  around  the  Canossa 
palace  at  Verona.  A  sense  of  the  beautiful  house  by  the 
Adige  was  part  of  the  pleasing  confusion  which  possessed 
them  in  Nuremberg  whenever  they  came  upon  the  ex- 
pression of  the  Gothic  spirit  common  both  to  the  German 
and  northern  Italian  art.  They  knew  that  it  was  an  effect 
which  had  passed  from  Germany  into  Italy,  but  in  the 
liberal  air  of  the  older  land  it  had  come  to  so  much  more 
beauty  that  now,  when  they  found  it  in  its  home,  it  seemed 
something  fetched  from  over  the  Alps  and  coarsened  in 
the  attempt  to  naturalize  it  to  an  alien  air. 

In  the  Germanic  Museum  they  fled  to  the  Italian 
painters  from  the  German  pictures  these  had  inspired;  in 
the  great  hall  of  the  Rathhaus  the  noble  "Processional" 
of  Diirer  was  the  more  precious  because  his  "Triumph 
of  Maximilian"  somehow  suggested  Mantegna's  "Triumph 
of  Caesar."  There  was  to  be  a  banquet  in  the  hall,  under 
the  mighty  fresco,  to  welcome  the  German  Emperor,  com- 
ing the  next  week,  and  the  Rathhaus  was  full  of  work- 
people furbishing  it  up  against  his  arrival  and  making  it 
difficult  for  the  custodian  who  had  it  in  charge  to  show  it 
properly  to  strangers.  She  was  of  the  same  enthusiastic 
sisterhood  as  the  vergeress  of  St.  Lawrence  and  the 
guardian  of  the  old  cemetery,  and  by  a  mighty  effort 
she  prevailed  over  the  workmen  so  far  as  to  lead  her 
charges  out  through  the  corridor  where  the  literal  con- 
science of  the  brothers  Kuhn  has  wrought  in  the  roof 
to  an  exact  image  of  a  tournament  as  it  was  in  Nurem- 
berg four  hundred  years  ago.  In  this  relief,  thronged 
with  men  and  horses,  the  gala-life  of  the  past  survives 

47 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

in  unexampled  fulnless;  and  March  blamed  himself 
after  enjoying  it  for  having  felt  in  it  that  toy-figure 
quality  which  seems  the  final  effect  of  the  German  Gothi- 
cism  in  sculpture. 

They  agreed  that  now  he  ought  really  to  find  out  some- 
thing about  the  contemporary  life  of  Nuremberg,  and  the 
next  morning  he  went  out  before  breakfast  and  strolled 
through  some  of  the  simpler  streets,  in  the  hope  of  inti- 
mate impressions.  The  peasant  women,  serving  portions 
of  milk  from  house  to  house  out  of  the  cans  in  the  little 
wagons  which  they  drew  themselves,  were  a  touch  of 
pleasing  domestic  comedy;  a  certain  effect  of  tragedy 
imparted  itself  from  the  lamentations  of  the  sucking-pigs 
jolted  over  the  pavements  in  hand-carts;  a  certain  maj- 
esty from  the  long  procession  of  yellow  mail-wagons,  with 
drivers  in  the  royal  Bavarian  blue,  trooping  by  in  the  cold, 
small  rain,  impassibly  drippling  from  their  glazed  hat- 
brims  upon  their  uniforms.  But  he  could  not  feel  that 
these  things  were  any  of  them  very  poignantly  significant, 
and  March  covered  his  retreat  from  the  actualities  of  Nu- 
remberg by  visiting  the  chief  book-store  and  buying  more 
photographs  of  the  architecture  than  he  wanted  and  more 
local  histories  than  he  should  ever  read.  He  made  a  last 
effort  for  the  contemporaneous  life  by  asking  the  English- 
speaking  clerk  if  there  were  any  literary  men  of  distinc- 
tion living  in  Nuremberg,  and  the  clerk  said  there  was 
not  one. 

"It  makes  me  feel  as  if  I  must  go  to  see  the  house  of 
Diirer,  after  all,"  he  said,  when  he  got  back  to  Mrs. 
March,  still  lingering  over  her  breakfast. 

"Well,  I  knew  we  should  have  to,  sooner  or  later." 

It  was  the  thing  that  they  had  said  would  not  do,  in 
Nuremberg,  because  everybody  did  it;  but  now  they 
hailed  a  fiacre,  and  ordered  it  driven  to  Diirer's  house, 

which  they  found  in  a  remote  part  of  the  town  near  a 

48 


NUREMBERG 

stretch  of  the  city  wall,  varied  in  its  picturesqueness  by 
the  interposition  of  a  dripping  grove;  it  was  raining 
again  by  the  tune  they  reached  it.  The  quarter  had  lapsed 
from  earlier  dignity,  and,  without  being  squalid,  it  looked 
worn  and  hard  worked;  otherwise  it  could  hardly  have 
been  different  in  Durer's  time.  His  dwelling,  in  no  way 
impressive  outside,  amid  the  environing  quaintness,  stood 
at  the  corner  of  a  narrow  sidehill  street  that  sloped  city- 
ward ;  and  within  it  was  stripped  bare  of  all  the  furniture 
of  life  belowstairs,  and  above  was  none  the  cozier  for  the 
stiff  appointment  of  a  show-house.  It  was  cavernous  and 
cold;  but  if  there  had  been  a  fire  in  the  kitchen,  and  a 
table  laid  in  the  dining-room,  and  beds  equipped  for  night- 
mare, after  the  German  fashion,  in  the  empty  chambers, 
one  could  have  imagined  a  kindly,  simple,  neighborly 
existence  there.  It  in  no  wise  suggested  the  calling  of  an 
artist,  perhaps  because  artists  had  not  begun  in  Diirer's 
time  to  take  themselves  so  objectively  as  they  do  now, 
but  it  implied  the  life  of  a  prosperous  citizen,  and  it  ex- 
pressed the  period. 

The  Marches  wrote  their  names  in  the  visitors'  book, 
and  paid  the  visitor's  fee,  which  also  bought  them  tickets 
in  an  annual  lottery  for  a  reproduction  of  one  of  Diirer's 
pictures;  and  then  they  came  away,  by  no  means  dis- 
satisfied with  his  house.  By  its  association  with  his  so- 
journs in  Italy  it  recalled  visits  to  other  shrines,  and  they 
had  to  own  that  it  was  really  no  worse  than  Ariosto's 
house  at  Ferrara,  or  Petrarch's  at  Arqua,  or  Michelangelo's 
at  Florence.  "But  what  I  admire,"  he  said,  "is  our  futility 
in  going  to  see  it.  We  expected  to  surprise  some  quality 
of  the  man  left  lying  about  in  the  house  because  he  had 
lived  and  died  in  it;  and  because  his  wife  had  kept  him 
up  so  close  there,  and  worked  him  so  hard  to  save  his 
widow  from  coming  to  want." 

"Who  said  she  did  that?" 

49 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

"A  friend  of  his  who  hated  her.  But  he  had  to  allow 
that  she  was  a  God-fearing  woman  and  had  a  New  Eng- 
land conscience." 

"Well,  I  dare  say  Diirer  was  easy-going." 
"Yes;  but  I  don't  like  her  laying  her  plans  to  survive 
him;  though  women  always  do  that." 


V 

ANSBACH 

THEY  left  Nuremberg  the  next  morning  "high  sorrow- 
ful and  cloyed,"  but  at  the  first  station  where  the 
train  stopped,  a  young  German  bowed  himself  into  the 
compartment  with  the  Marches,  and  so  visibly  resisted 
an  impulse  to  smoke  that  March  begged  him  to  light  his 
cigarette.  In  the  talk  which  this  friendly  overture  led  to 
between  them  he  explained  that  he  was  a  railway  archi- 
tect, employed  by  the  government  on  that  line  of  road, 
and  was  traveling  officially.  March  spoke  of  Nuremberg; 
he  owned  the  sort  of  surfeit  he  had  suffered  from  its  ex- 
cessive medievalism,  and  the  young  man  said  it  was  part 
of  the  new  imperial  patriotism  to  cherish  the  Gothic 
throughout  Germany;  no  other  sort  of  architecture  was 
permitted  in  Nuremberg.  But  they  would  find  enough 
classicism  at  Ansbach,  he  promised  them,  and  he  entered 
with  sympathetic  intelligence  into  their  wish  to  see  this 
former  capital  when  March  told  him  they  were  going  to 
stop  there,  in  hopes  of  something  typical  of  the  old  dis- 
jointed Germany  of  the  petty  principalities,  the  little 
paternal  despotisms  now  extinct. 

As  they  talked  on,  partly  in  German  and  partly  in 
English,  their  purpose  in  visiting  Ansbach  appeared  to 
the  Marches  more  meditated  than  it  was.  They  took 
more  and  more  credit  to  themselves  for  a  reasoned  and 
definite  motive,  in  the  fight  of  their  companion's  enthu- 
siasm for  the  place,  and  its  charm  began  for  them  with  the 

51 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

drive  from  the  station  through  streets  whose  sentiment 
was  both  Italian  and  French,  and  where  there  was  a  yellow- 
ish cast  in  the  gray  of  the  architecture  which  was  almost 
Mantuan.  They  rested  their  sensibilities,  so  bruised  and 
fretted  by  Gothic  angles  and  points,  against  the  smooth 
surfaces  of  the  prevailing  classicistic  facades  of  the  houses 
as  they  passed,  and  when  they  arrived  at  their  hotel,  an 
old  mansion  of  Versailles  type,  fronting  on  a  long,  irreg- 
ular square  planted  with  pollarded  sycamores,  they  said 
that  it  might  as  well  have  been  Lucca. 

The  archway  and  stairway  of  the  hotel  were  draped 
with  the  Bavarian  colors,  and  they  were  obscurely  flat- 
tered to  learn  that  Prince  Leopold,  the  brother  of  the 
Prince-Regent  of  the  kingdom,  had  taken  rooms  there, 
on  his  way  to  the  maneuvers  at  Nuremberg,  and  was 
momently  expected  with  his  suite.  They  realized  that 
they  were  not  of  the  princely  party,  however,  when  they 
were  told  that  he  had  sole  possession  of  the  dining-room, 
and  they  went  out  to  another  hotel,  and  had  their  supper 
in  keeping  delightfully  native.  People  seemed  to  come 
there  to  write  their  letters  and  make  up  their  accounts, 
as  well  as  to  eat  their  suppers;  they  called  for  stationery 
like  characters  in  old  comedy,  and  the  clatter  of  crockery 
and  the  scratching  of  pens  went  on  together;  and  fortune 
offered  the  Marches  a  delicate  reparation  for  their  exclu- 
sion from  their  own  hotel  in  the  cold  popular  reception  of 
the  prince  which  they  got  back  just  in  time  to  witness. 
A  very  small  group  of  people,  mostly  women  and  boys, 
had  gathered  to  see  him  arrive,  but  there  was  no  cheering 
or  any  sign  of  public  interest.  Perhaps  he  personally 
merited  none;  he  looked  a  dull,  sad  man,  with  his  plain, 
stubbed  features;  and  after  he  had  mounted  to  his  apart- 
ment the  officers  of  his  staff  stood  quite  across  the  land- 
ing and  barred  the  passage  of  the  Americans,  ignoring 

e7en  Mrs.  March's  presence,  as  they  talked  together. 

52 


ANSBACH 

"Well,  my  dear,"  said  her  husband,  "here  you  have  it 
at  last.  This  is  what  you've  been  living  for  ever  since  we 
came  to  Germany.  It's  a  great  moment." 

"Yes.    What  are  you  going  to  do?" 

"Who?  I?  Oh,  nothing!  This  is  your  affair;  it's  for 
you  to  act." 

If  she  had  been  young,  she  might  have  withered  them 
with  a  glance;  she  doubted  now  if  her  dim  eyes  would 
have  any  such  power;  but  she  advanced  steadily  upon 
them,  and  then  the  officers  seemed  aware  of  her  and  stood 
aside. 

March  always  insisted  that  they  stood  aside  apologeti- 
cally, but  she  held  as  firmly  that  they  stood  aside  imperti- 
nently, or  at  least  indifferently,  and  that  the  insult  to 
her  American  womanhood  was  perfectly  ideal.  It  is  true 
that  nothing  of  the  kind  happened  again  during  their 
stay  at  the  hotel;  the  prince's  officers  were  afterward 
about  hi  the  corridors  and  on  the  stairs,  but  they  offered 
no  shadow  of  obstruction  to  her  going  and  coming,  and 
the  landlord  himself  was  not  so  preoccupied  with  his 
highhotes  but  he  had  time  to  express  his  grief  that  she 
had  been  obliged  to  go  out  for  supper. 

They  began  at  once  to  satisfy  the  passion  for  the  little 
obsolete  capital  which  had  been  growing  upon  them  by 
strolling  past  the  old  Residenz  at  an  hour  so  favorable 
for  a  first  impression.  It  loomed  in  the  gathering  dusk 
even  vaster  than  it  was,  and  it  was  really  vast  enough  for 
the  pride  of  a  King  of  France,  much  more  a  Margrave 
of  Ansbach.  Time  had  blackened  and  blotched  its  coarse 
limestone  walls  to  one  complexion  with  the  statues  swell- 
ing and  strutting  in  the  figure  of  Roman  legionaries  be- 
fore it,  and  standing  out  against  the  evening  sky  along 
its  balustraded  roof,  and  had  softened  to  the  right  tint 
the  stretch  of  half  a  dozen  houses  with  Mansard  roofs  and 

Renaissance  fagades  obsequiously  in  keeping  with  the 
5  53 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

Versailles  ideal  of  a  Residenz.  In  the  rear,  and  elsewhere 
at  fit  distance  from  its  courts,  a  native  architecture  pre- 
vailed; and  at  no  great  remove  the  travelers  found  them- 
selves in  a  simple  German  town  again.  There  they 
stumbled  upon  a  little  bookseller's  shop  blinking  in  a 
quiet  corner,  and  bought  three  or  four  guides  and  small 
histories  of  Ansbach,  which  they  carried  home  and  studied 
between  drowsing  and  waking.  The  wonderful  German 
syntax  seems  at  its  most  enigmatical  in  this  sort  of  litera- 
ture, and  sometimes  they  lost  themselves  in  its  labyrinths 
completely,  and  only  made  their  way  perilously  out  with 
the  help  of  cumulative  declensions,  past  articles  and  ad- 
jectives blindly  seeking  their  nouns,  to  long-procrasti- 
nated verbs  dancing  like  swamp-fires  in  the  distance.  They 
emerged  a  little  less  ignorant  than  they  went  in,  and  better 
qualified  than  they  would  otherwise  have  been  for  their 
second  visit  to  the  Schloss,  which  they  paid  early  the 
next  morning. 

They  were  so  early,  indeed,  that  when  they  mounted 
from  the  great  inner  court,  much  too  big  for  Ansbach,  if 
not  for  the  building,  and  rang  the  custodian's  bell,  a  smil- 
ing maid  who  let  them  into  an  anteroom,  where  she  kept 
on  picking  over  vegetables  for  her  dinner,  said  the  custo- 
dian was  busy,  and  could  not  be  seen  till  ten  o'clock.  She 
seemed,  in  her  nook  of  the  pretentious  pile,  as  innocently 
unconscious  of  its  history  as  any  hen-sparrow  who  had 
built  her  nest  in  some  coign  of  its  architecture;  and  her 
friendly,  peaceful  domesticity  remained  a  wholesome 
human  background  to  the  tragedies  and  comedies  of  the 
past,  and  held  them  in  a  picturesque  relief  in  which  they 
were  alike  tolerable  and  even  charming. 

The  history  of  Ansbach  strikes  its  roots  in  the  soil  of 
fable,  and  aboveground  is  a  gnarled  and  twisted  growth 
of  good  and  bad  from  the  time  of  the  Great  Charles  to 

the  time  of  the  Great  Frederick.   Between  these  times  she 

54 


ANSBACH 

had  her  various  rulers,  ecclesiastical  and  secular,  in  various 
forms  of  vassalage  to  the  empire;  but  for  nearly  four 
centuries  her  sovereignty  was  in  the  hands  of  the  mar- 
graves, who  reigned  hi  a  constantly  increasing  splendor 
till  the  last  sold  her  outright  to  the  King  of  Prussia  in 
1791,  and  went  to  live  in  England  on  the  proceeds.  She 
had  taken  her  part  in  the  miseries  and  glories  of  the  wars 
that  desolated  Germany,  but  after  the  Reformation,  when 
she  turned  from  the  ancient  faith  to  which  she  owed  her 
cloistered  origin  under  St.  Gumpertus,  her  people  had 
peace  except  when  their  last  prince  sold  them  to  fight  the 
battles  of  others.  It  is  in  this  last  transaction  that  her 
history,  almost  in  the  moment  when  she  ceased  to  have  a 
history  of  her  own,  links  to  that  of  the  modern  world,  and 
that  it  came  home  to  the  Marches  in  their  national  char- 
acter; for  two  thousand  of  those  poor  Ansbach  merce- 
naries were  bought  by  England  and  sent  to  put  down  a 
rebellion  in  her  American  colonies. 

Humanly,  they  were  more  concerned  for  the  Last  Mar- 
grave, because  of  certain  qualities  which  made  him  the 
Best  Margrave,  in  spite  of  the  defects  of  his  qualities. 
He  was  the  son  of  the  Mad  Margrave,  equally  known  hi 
the  Ansbach  annals,  who  may  not  have  been  the  Worst 
Margrave,  but  who  had  certainly  a  bad  trick  of  putting 
his  subjects  to  death  without  trial,  and  in  cases  where 
there  was  special  haste,  with  his  own  hand.  He  sent  his 
son  to  the  university  at  Utrecht  because  he  believed  that 
the  republican  influences  in  Holland  would  be  wholesome 
for  him,  and  then  he  sent  him  to  travel  in  Italy;  but  when 
the  boy  came  home  looking  frail  and  sick  the  Wild  Mar- 
grave charged  his  official  traveling  companion  with  neg- 
lect, and  had  the  unhappy  Hofrath  Meyer  hanged  with- 
out process  for  this  crime.  One  of  the  gentlemen  of  his 
realm,  for  a  pasquinade  on  the  Margrave,  was  brought  to 

the  scaffold;  he  had,  at  various  times,  twenty-two  of  his 

55 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

soldiers  shot  with  arrows  and  bullets  or  hanged  for  deser- 
tion, besides  many  whose  penalties  his  clemency  com- 
muted to  the  loss  of  an  ear  or  a  nose;  a  Hungarian  who 
killed  his  hunting-dog  he  had  broken  alive  on  the  wheel. 
A  soldier's  wife  was  hanged  for  complicity  in  a  case  of 
desertion;  a  young  soldier  who  eloped  with  the  girl  he 
loved  was  brought  to  Ansbach  from  a  neighboring  town, 
and  hanged  with  her  on  the  same  gallows.  A  sentry  at 
the  door  of  one  of  the  Margrave's  castles  amiably  com- 
plied with  the  Margrave's  request  to  let  him  take  his  gun 
for  a  moment,  on  the  pretense  of  wishing  to  look  at  it. 
For  this  breach  of  discipline  the  prince  covered  him  with 
abuse  and  gave  him  over  to  his  hussars,  who  bound  him 
to  a  horse's  tail  and  dragged  him  through  the  streets; 
he  died  of  his  injuries.  The  kennel-master  who  had  charge 
of  the  Margrave's  dogs  was  accused  of  neglecting  them; 
without  further  inquiry  the  Margrave  rode  to  the  man's 
house  and  shot  him  down  on  his  own  threshold.  A  shep- 
herd who  met  the  Margrave  on  a  shying  horse  did  not 
get  his  flock  out  of  the  way  quickly  enough;  the  Margrave 
demanded  the  pistols  of  a  gentleman  in  his  company,  but 
he  answered  that  they  were  not  loaded,  and  the  shep- 
herd's life  was  saved.  Later  their  owner  fired  them  into 
the  air.  "What  does  that  mean?"  cried  the  Margrave, 
furiously.  "It  means, -gracious  lord,  that  you  will  sleep 
sweeter  to-night  for  not  having  heard  my  pistols  an  hour 
sooner." 

From  this  it  appears  that  the  gracious  lord  had  his 
moments  of  regret;  but  perhaps  it  is  not  altogether  strange 
that  when  he  died  the  whole  population  "stormed  through 
the  streets  to  meet  his  funeral  train,  not  in  awe-stricken 
silence  to  meditate  on  the  fall  of  human  grandeur,  but  to 
unite  in  an  eager  tumult  of  rejoicing,  as  if  some  cruel 
brigand  who  had  long  held  the  city  in  terror  were  delivered 

over  to  them  bound  and  in  chains."    For  nearly  thirty 

66 


ANSBACH 

years  this  blood-stained  miscreant  had  reigned  over  his 
hapless  people  in  a  sovereign  plenitude  of  power,  which 
by  the  theory  of  German  imperialism  in  our  day  is  still  a 
divine  right. 

They  called  him  the  Mad  Margrave,  in  their  instinctive 
revolt  from  the  belief  that  any  man  not  untamably  savage 
could  be  guilty  of  his  atrocities;  and  they  called  his  son 
the  Last  Margrave,  with  a  touch  of  the  poetry  which  per- 
haps records  a  regret  for  their  extinction  as  a  state.  He 
did  not  harry  them  as  his  father  had  done;  his  mild  rule 
was  the  effect  partly  of  the  indifference  and  distaste  for 
his  country  bred  by  his  long  sojourn  abroad;  but  doubt- 
less also  it  was  the  effect  of  a  kindly  nature.  Even  in  the 
matter  of  selling  a  few  thousands  of  them  to  fight  the 
battles  of  a  bad  cause  on  the  other  side  of  the  world,  he 
had  the  best  of  motives,  and  faithfully  applied  the  pro- 
ceeds to  the  payment  of  the  state  debt  and  the  embellish- 
ment of  the  capital. 

His  mother  was  a  younger  sister  of  Frederick  the  Great, 
and  was  so  constantly  at  war  with  her  husband  that  prob- 
ably she  had  nothing  to  do  with  the  marriage  which  the 
Mad  Margrave  forced  upon  their  son.  Love  certainly  had 
nothing  to  do  with  it,  and  the  Last  Margrave  early  escaped 
from  it  to  the  society  of  Mile.  Clairon,  the  great  French 
tragedienne,  whom  he  met  in  Paris,  and  whom  he  per- 
suaded to  come  and  make  her  home  with  him  in  Ansbach. 
She  lived  there  seventeen  years,  and  though  always  an 
alien,  she  bore  herself  with  kindness  to  all  classes,  and  is 
still  remembered  there  by  the  roll  of  butter  which  calls 
itself  a  Klarungswecke  in  its  imperfect  French. 

No  roll  of  butter  records  in  flattering  accents  the  name 
of  the  brilliant  and  disdainful  English  lady  who  replaced 
this  poor  tragic  muse  in  the  Margrave's  heart,  though 
the  lady  herself  lived  to  be  the  last  Margravine  of  Ans- 
bach, where  everybody  seems  to  have  hated  her  with  a 

57 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

passion  which  she  doubtless  knew  how  to  return.  She 
was  the  daughter  of  the  Earl  of  Berkeley,  and  the  wife 
of  Lord  Craven,  a  sufficiently  unfaithful  and  unworthy 
nobleman  by  her  account,  from  whom  she  was  living 
apart  when  the  Margrave  asked  her  to  his  capital.  There 
she  set  herself  to  oust  Mile.  Clairon  with  sneers  and  jests 
for  the  theatrical  style  which  the  actress  could  not  out- 
live. Lady  Craven  said  she  was  sure  Clairon's  nightcap 
must  be  a  crown  of  gilt  paper;  and  when  Clairon  threat- 
ened to  kill  herself,  and  the  Margrave  was  alarmed,  "  You 
forget,"  said  Lady  Craven,  "that  actresses  only  stab 
themselves  under  their  sleeves." 

She  drove  Clairon  from  Ansbach,  and  the  great  trage- 
dienne returned  to  Paris,  where  she  remained  true  to  her 
false  friend,  and  from  time  to  time  wrote  him  letters  full 
of  magnanimous  counsel  and  generous  tenderness.  But 
she  could  not  have  been  so  good  company  as  Lady  Craven, 
who  was  a  very  gifted  person  and  knew  how  to  compose 
songs  and  sing  them,  and  write  comedies  and  play  them, 
and  who  could  keep  the  Margrave  amused  in  many  ways. 
When  his  loveless  and  childless  wife  died  he  married  the 
Englishwoman,  but  he  grew  more  and  more  weary  of  his 
dull  little  court  and  his  dull  little  country,  and  after 
a  while,  considering  the  uncertain  tenure  sovereigns  had 
of  their  heads  since  the  French  King  had  lost  his,  and  the 
fact  that  he  had  no  heirs  to  follow  him  in  his  principality, 
he  resolved  to  cede  it  for  a  certain  sum  to  Prussia.  To  this 
end  his  wife's  urgence  was  perhaps  not  wanting.  They 
went  to  England,  where  she  outlived  him  ten  years  and 
wrote  her  memoirs. 

The  qustodian  of  the  Schloss  came  at  last,  and  the 
Marches  saw  instantly  that  he  was  worth  waiting  for.  He 
was  as  vainglorious  of  the  palace  as  any  grand-monarch- 
ing  margrave  of  them  all.  He  could  not  have  been  more 

personally  superb  in  showing  their  different  effigies  if  they 

58 


ANSBACH 

had  been  his  own  family  portraits,  and  he  would  not  spare 
the  strangers  a  single  splendor  of  the  twenty  vast,  hand- 
some, tiresome,  Versailles-like  rooms  he  led  them  through. 
The  rooms  were  fatiguing  physically,  but  so  poignantly 
interesting  that  Mrs.  March  would  not  have  missed, 
though  she  perished  of  her  pleasure,  one  of  the  things  she 
saw — the  pictures,  the  porcelains,  the  thrones  and  can- 
opies, the  tapestries,  the  historical  associations  with  the 
margraves  and  their  marriages,  with  the  Great  Frederick 
and  the  Great  Napoleon.  The  Great  Napoleon's  man 
Bernadotte  made  the  Schloss  his  headquarters  when  he 
occupied  Ansbach  after  Austerlitz,  and  here  he  completed 
his  arrangements  for  taking  her  bargain  from  Prussia  and 
handing  it  over  to  Bavaria,  with  whom  it  still  remains. 
Twice  the  Great  Frederick  had  sojourned  in  the  palace, 
visiting  his  sister  Louise,  the  wife  of  the  Mad  Margrave, 
and  more  than  once  it  had  welcomed  her  next  neighbor 
and  sister  Wilhelmina,  the  Margravine  of  Baireuth,  whose 
autobiographic  voice,  piercingly  plaintive  and  reproachful, 
seemed  to  quiver  in  the  air.  Here,  oddly  enough,  the  spell 
of  the  Mad  Margrave  weakened  in  the  presence  of  his 
portrait,  which  signally  failed  to  justify  his  fame  of  furious 
tyrant.  That  seems,  indeed,  to  have  been  rather  the  pop- 
ular and  historical  conception  of  him  than  the  impression 
he  made  upon  his  exalted  contemporaries.  The  Mar- 
gravine of  Baireuth,  at  any  rate,  could  so  far  excuse  her 
poor  blood-stained  brother-in-law  as  to  say:  "The  Mar- 
grave of  Ansbach  .  .  .  was  a  young  prince  who  had  been 
very  badly  educated .  He  continually  ill-treated  my  sister ; 
they  led  the  life  of  cat  and  dog.  My  sister,  it  is  true,  was 
sometimes  in  fault.  .  .  .  Her  education  had  been  very 
bad.  .  .  .  She  was  married  at  fourteen." 

At  parting,  the  custodian  told  the  Marches  that  he 
would  easily  have  known  them  for  Americans  by  the  hand- 
some fee  they  gave  him;  they  came  away  flown  with  his 

59 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

praise;  and  their  national  vanity  was  again  flattered  when 
they  got  out  into  the  principal  square  of  Ansbach.  There, 
in  a  bookseller's  window,  they  found  among  the  pam- 
phlets teaching  different  languages  without  a  master,  one 
devoted  to  the  Amerikanische  Sprache  as  distinguished 
from  the  Englische  Sprache.  That  there  could  be  no  mis- 
take, the  cover  was  printed  in  colors  after  a  German  ideal 
of  the  star-spangled  banner;  and  March  said  he  always 
knew  that  we  had  a  language  of  our  own,  and  that  now  he 
was  going  in  to  buy  that  pamphlet  and  find  out  what  it 
was  like.  He  asked  the  young  shop-woman  how  it  differed 
from  English,  which  she  spoke  fairly  well  from  having  lived 
eight  years  in  Chicago.  She  said  that  it  differed  from  the 
English  mainly  in  emphasis  and  pronunciation.  "For  in- 
stance, the  English  say  'Half  past,'  and  the  Americans  'Half 
past';  the  English  say  laht  and  the  Americans  say  late." 

The  weather  had  now  been  clear  quite  long  enough, 
and  it  was  raining  again,  a  fine,  bitter,  piercing  drizzle. 
They  asked  the  girl  if  it  always  rained  in  Ansbach;  and 
she  owned  that  it  nearly  always  did.  She  said  that  some- 
times she  longed  for  a  little  American  summer;  that  it 
was  never  quite  warm  in  Ansbach. 

They  went  home^  to  their  hotel  for  their  midday  dinner, 
and  to  the  comfort  of  having  it  nearly  all  to  themselves. 
Prince  Leopold  had  risen  early,  like  all  the  hard-working 
potentates  of  the  Continent,  and  got  away  to  the  ma- 
neuvers at  six  o'clock;  the  decorations  had  been  removed, 
and  the  courtyard  where  the  hired  coach  and  pair  of 
the  prince  had  rolled  in  the  evening  before  had  only  a 
few  majestic  ducks  waddling  about  in  it  and  quacking 
together,  indifferent  to  the  presence  of  a  yellow  mail- 
wagon,  on  which  the  driver  had  been  apparently  dozing 
till  the  hour  of  noon  should  sound.  He  sat  there  immov- 
able, but  at  the  last  stroke  of  the  clock  he  woke  up  and 

drove  vigorously  away  to  the  station. 

60 


ANSBACH 

The  dining-room  which  they  had  been  kept  out  of  by 
the  prince  the  night  before  was  not  such  as  to  embitter  the 
sense  of  their  wrong  by  its  splendor.  After  all,  the  tastes 
of  royalty  must  be  simple,  if  the  prince  might  have  gone 
to  the  Schloss  and  had  chosen  rather  to  stay  at  this  modest 
hotel;  but  perhaps  the  Schloss  was  reserved  for  more  im- 
mediate royalty  than  the  brothers  of  prince-regents;  and 
in  that  case  he  could  not  have  done  better  than  dine 
at  the  Golden  Star.  If  he  paid  no  more  than  two  marks, 
he  dined  as  cheaply  as  a  prince  could  wish,  and  as  abun- 
dantly. The  wine  at  Ansbach  was  rather  thin  and  sour, 
but  the  bread,  March  declared,  was  the  best  bread  in 
the  whole  world,  not  excepting  the  bread  of  Carlsbad. 

ifter  dinner  the  Marches  had  some  of  the  local  pastry, 
n'  c  so  incomparable  as  the  bread,  with  their  coffee,  which 
they  had  served  them  in  a  pavilion  of  the  beautiful  garden 
remaining  to  the  hotel  from  the  time  when  it  was  a  patri- 
cian mansion.  The  garden  had  roses  in  it  and  several  sorts 
of  late  summer  flowers,  as  well  as  ripe  cherries,  currants, 
grapes,  and  a  Virginia-creeper  red  with  autumn,  all  har- 
moniously contemporaneous,  as  they  might  easily  be  in 
a  climate  where  no  one  of  the  seasons  can  very  well  know 
itself  from  the  others.  It  had  not  been  raining  for  half 
an  hour,  and  the  sun  was  scalding  hot,  so  that  the  shelter 
of  then-  roof  was  very  grateful,  and  the  puddles  of  the 
paths  were  drying  up  with  the  haste  which  puddles  have 
to  make  in  Germany,  between  rains,  if  they  are  ever  going 
to  dry  up  at  all. 

In  the  late  afternoon  they  went  to  the  cafe"  in  the  old 
Orangery  of  the  Schloss  for  a  cup  of  tea,  and  found  them- 
selves in  the  company  of  several  Ansbach  ladies  who  had 
brought  their  work,  in  the  evident  habit  of  coming  there 
every  afternoon  for  their  coffee  and  for  a  dish  of  gossip. 
They  were  kind,  uncomely,  motherly-looking  bodies;  one 

of  them  combed  her  hah-  at  the  table;   and  they  all  sat 

61 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

outside  of  the  cafe"  with  their  feet  on  the  borders  of  the 
puddles  which  had  not  dried  up  there  in  the  shade  of  the 
building.  A  deep  lawn,  darkened  at  its  farther  edge  by 
the  long  shadows  of  trees,  stretched  before  them  with  the 
sunset  light  on  it,  and  it  was  all  very  quiet  and  friendly. 
The  tea  brought  to  the  Marches  was  brewed  from  some 
herb  apparently  of  native  growth,  with  bits  of  what  looked 
like  willow  leaves  hi  it,  but  it  was  flavored  with  a  clove 
in  each  cup,  and  they  sat  contentedly  over  it  and  tried  to 
make  out  what  the  Ansbach  ladies  were  talking  about. 
These  had  recognized  the  strangers  for  Americans,  and 
one  of  them  explained  that  Americans  spoke  the  same 
language  as  the  English  and  yet  were  not  quite  the  same 
people. 

There  were  a  few  people  walking  up  and  down  in  the 
alley,  making  the  most  of  the  moment  of  dry  weather. 
They  saluted  one  another  like  acquaintances,  and  three 
clean-shaven,  walnut-faced  old  peasants  bowed  in  response 
to  March's  stare,  with  a  self-respectful  civility.  They 
were  yeomen  of  the  region  of  Ansbach,  where  the  country 
round  about  is  dotted  with  their  cottages,  and  not  held 
in  vast  homeless  tracts  by  the  nobles  as  in  North  Germany. 

The  Bavarian  who  had  imparted  this  fact  to  March  at 
breakfast,  not  without  a  certain  pride  in  it  to  the  tacit 
disadvantage  of  the  Prussians,  was  at  the  supper-table, 
and  was  disposed  to  more  talk,  which  he  managed  in  a 
stout,  slow  English  of  his  own.  He  said  he  had  never 
really  spoken  English  with  an  English-speaking  person 
before,  or  at  all  since  he  studied  it  in  school  at  Munich. 

"I  should  be  afraid  to  put  my  school-boy  German 
against  your  English,"  March  said,  and,  when  he  had 
understood,  the  other  laughed  for  pleasure,  and  reported 
the  compliment  to  his  wife  in  their  own  parlance.  "You 
Germans  certainly  beat  us  in  languages." 

"Oh,  well,"  he  retaliated,  "the  Americans  beat  us  in 

62 


ANSBACH 

some  other  things,"  and  Mrs.  March  felt  that  this  was 
but  just;  she  would  have  liked  to  mention  a  few,  but  not 
ungraciously;  she  and  the  German  lady  kept  smiling 
across  the  table  and  trying  detached  vocables  of  their 
respective  tongues  upon  each  other. 

The  Bavarian  said  he  lived  in  Munich  still,  but  was  in 
Ansbach  on  an  affair  of  business;  he  asked  March  if  he 
were  not  going  to  see  the  maneuvers.  Till  now  the 
maneuvers  had  merely  been  the  interesting  background 
of  their  travel;  but  now,  hearing  that  the  Emperor  of 
Germany,  the  King  of  Saxony,  the  Regent  of  Bavaria, 
and  the  King  of  Wiirtemberg,  the  Grand  Dukes  of  Wei- 
mar and  Baden,  with  visiting  potentates  of  all  sorts,  and 
innumerable  lesser  highhotes,  foreign  and  domestic,  were 
to  be  present,  Mrs.  March  resolved  that  they  must  go  to 
at  least  one  of  the  reviews. 

"  If  you  go  to  Frankfort,  you  can  see  the  King  of  Italy, 
too,"  said  the  Bavarian,  but  he  owned  that  they  probably 
could  not  get  into  a  hotel  there,  and  he  asked  why  they 
should  not  go  to  Wiirzburg,  where  they  could  see  all  the 
sovereigns  except  the  King  of  Italy. 

"Wiirzburg?  Wiirzburg?"  March  queried  of  his  wife. 
"Where  did  we  hear  of  that  place?" 

"  Oh  yes,"  said  March,  and  in  then*  rooms  his  wife  got 
out  all  then*  guides  and  maps  and  began  to  inform  herself 
and  to  inform  him  about  Wiirzburg.  But  first  she  said  it 
was  very  cold  and  he  must  order  some  fire  made  in  the  tall 
German  stove  in  their  parlor.  The  maid  who  came  said 
"Gleich,"  but  she  did  not  come  back,  and  about  the  time 
they  were  getting  furious  at  her  neglect  they  began  getting 
warm.  He  put  his  hand  on  the  stove  and  found  it  hot; 
then  he  looked  down  for  a  door  in  the  stove  where  he 
might  shut  a  damper;  there  was  no  door. 

"Good  Heavens!"  he  shouted.    "It's  like  something  in 

a  dream,"  and  he  ran  to  pull  the  bell  for  help. 

63 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

"No,  no!  Don't  ring!  It  will  make  us  ridiculous. 
They'll  think  Americans  don't  know  anything.  There 
must  be  some  way  of  dampening  the  stove;  and  if  there 
isn't,  I'd  rather  suffocate  than  give  myself  away."  Mrs. 
March  ran  and  opened  the  window,  while  her  husband 
carefully  examined  the  stove  at  every  point,  and  explored 
the  pipe  for  the  damper  in  vain.  "Can't  you  find  it?"  The 
night  wind  came  in  raw  and  damp  and  threatened  to 
blow  their  lamp  out,  and  she  was  obliged  to  shut  the 
window. 

"Not  a  sign  of  it.  I  will  go  down  and  ask  the  landlord 
in  strict  confidence  how  they  dampen  their  stoves  in 
Ansbach." 

"Well,  if  you  must.  It's  getting  hotter  every  moment." 
She  followed  him  timorously  into  the  corridor,  lit  by  a 
hanging-lamp,  turned  low  for  the  night. 

He  looked  at  his  watch;  it  was  eleven  o'clock.  "I'm 
afraid  they're  all  in  bed." 

"Yes;  you  mustn't  go!  We  must  try  to  find  out  for 
ourselves.  What  cart  that  door  be  for?" 

It  was  a  low  iron  door,  half  the  height  of  a  man,  in  the 
wall  near  their  room,  and  it  yielded  to  his  pull.  "Get  a 
candle,"  he  whispered,  and  when  she  brought  it  he  stooped 
to  enter  the  doorway. 

He  disappeared  within,  and  then  came  back  to  the 
doorway.  "Just  come  in  here  a  moment."  She  found 
herself  in  a  sort  of  antechamber,  half  the  height  of  her 
own  room,  and,  following  his  gesture,  she  looked  down 
where  in  one  corner  some  crouching  monster  seemed  show- 
ing its  fiery  teeth  in  a  grin  of  derision.  This  grin  was  the 
damper  of  their  stove,  and  this  was  where  the  maid  had 
kindled  the  fire  which  had  been  roasting  them  alive  and 
was  still  joyously  chuckling  to  itself.  "  I  think  that  Munich 
man  was  wrong.  I  don't  believe  we  beat  the  Germans  in 

anything.    There  isn't  a  hotel  in  the  United  States  where 

64 


ANSBACH 

the  stoves  have  no  front  doors,  and  every  one  of  them  has 
the  space  of  a  good-sized  flat  given  up  to  the  convenience 
of  kindling  a  fire  in  it." 

After  a  red  sunset  of  shameless  duplicity  March  was 
awakened  to  a  rainy  morning  by  the  clinking  of  cavalry 
hoofs  on  the  pavement  of  the  long,  irregular  square  before 
the  hotel,  and  he  hurried  out  to  see  the  passing  of  the 
soldiers  on  their  way  to  the  maneuvers.  They  were 
troops  of  all  arms,  but  mainly  infantry,  and  as  they 
stumped  heavily  through  the  groups  of  apathetic  citizens 
in  their  mud-splashed  boots  they  took  the  steady  down- 
pour on  their  dripping  helmets.  Some  of  them  were 
smoking,  but  none  smiling,  except  one  gay  fellow  who 
made  a  joke  to  a  serving-maid  on  the  sidewalk.  An  old 
officer  halted  his  staff  to  scold  a  citizen  who  had  given 
him  a  mistaken  direction.  The  shame  of  the  erring  man 
was  great,  and  the  pride  of  a  fellow-citizen  who  corrected 
him  was  not  less,  though  the  arrogant  brute  before  whom 
they  both  cringed  used  them  with  equal  scorn;  the 
younger  officers  listened  indifferently  round  on  horseback 
behind  the  glitter  of  their  eye-glasses,  and  one  of  them 
amused  himself  by  turning  the  silver  bangles  on  his 
wrist. 

Then  the  files  of  soldier-slaves  passed  on,  and  March 
crossed  the  bridge  spanning  the  gardens  in  what  had  been 
the  city  moat,  and  found  his  way  to  the  market-place, 
under  the  walls  of  the  old  Gothic  church  of  St.  Gumpertus. 
The  market,  which  spread  pretty  well  over  the  square, 
seemed  to  be  also  a  fair,  with  peasants'  clothes  and  local 
pottery  for  sale,  as  well  as  fruits  and  vegetables,  and  large 
baskets  of  flowers,  with  old  women  squatting  before  them. 

He  bought  so  lavishly  of  the  flowers  to  carry  back  to 
his  wife  that  a  little  girl,  who  saw  his  armload  from  her 
window  as  he  returned,  laughed  at  him  and  then  drew 

shyly  back.    Her  laugh  reminded  him  how  many  happy 

65 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

children  he  had  seen  in  Germany,  and  how  freely  they 
seemed  to  play  everywhere,  with  no  one  to  make  them 
afraid.  When  they  grow  up  the  women  laugh  as  little  as 
the  men,  whose  rude  toil  the  soldiering  leaves  them  to. 

He  got  home  with  his  flowers,  his  wife  took  them  ab- 
sently and  made  him  join  her  in  a  sight  which  had  fas- 
cinated her  in  the  street  under  their  windows.  A  slender 
girl,  with  a  waist  as  slim  as  a  corseted  officer's,  from  time 
to  time  came  out  of  the  house  across  the  way  to  the  fire- 
wood which  had  been  thrown  from  a  wagon  upon  the 
sidewalk  there.  Each  time  she  embraced  several  of  the 
heavy  four-foot  logs  and  disappeared  with  them  indoors. 
Once  she  paused  from  her  work  to  joke  with  a  well- 
dressed  man  who  came  by  and  who  seemed  to  find  nothing 
odd  in  her  work;  some  gentlemen  lounging  at  the  win- 
dow overhead  watched  her  with  no  apparent  sense  of 
anomaly. 

"What  do  you  think  of  that?"  asked  Mrs.  March. 

"I  think  it's  good  exercise  for  the  girl,  and  I  should 
like  to  recommend  it  to  those  fat  fellows  at  the  window. 
I  suppose  she'll  saw  the  wood  in  the  cellar,  and  then  lug 
it  up-stairs,  and  pile  it  up  in  the  stoves'  dressing-rooms." 

"Don't  laugh!   It's  too  disgraceful." 

"Well,  I  don't  know!  If  you  like,  I'll  offer  these  gentle- 
men across  the  way  your  opinion  of  it  in  the  language  of 
Goethe  and  Schiller." 

"I  wish  you'd  offer  my  opinion  of  them.  They've  been 
staring  in  here  with  an  opera-glass." 

"Ah,  that's  a  different  affair.  There  isn't  much  going 
on  in  Ansbach,  and  they  have  to  make  the  most  of  it." 

The  lower  casements  of  the  house  were  furnished  with 
mirrors  set  at  right  angles  with  them,  and  nothing  which 
went  on  in  the  streets  was  lost.  Some  of  the  streets  were 
long  and  straight,  and  at  rare  moments  they  lay  full  of 

sun.    At  such  tunes  the  Marches  were  puzzled  by  the 

66 


ANSBACH 

sight  of  citizens  carrying  open]  'Umbrellas,  and  they  won- 
dered if  they  had  forgotten  to  put  them  down,  or  thought 
it  not  worth  while  in  the  brief  respites  from  the  rain,  or 
were  profiting  by  such  rare  occasions  to  dry  them;  and 
some  other  sights  remained  baffling  to  the  last.  Once  a 
man  with  his  hands  pinioned  before  him,  and  a  gendarme 
marching  stolidly  after  him  with  his  musket  on  his 
shoulder,  passed  under  their  windows;  but  who  he  was, 
or  what  he  had  done  or  was  to  suffer,  they  never  knew. 
Another  time  a  pair  went  by  on  the  way  to  the  railway 
station:  a  young  man  carrying  an  umbrella  under  his 
arm,  and  a  very  decent-looking  old  woman  lugging  a 
heavy  carpet-bag,  who  left  them  to  the  lasting  question 
whether  she  was  the  young  man's  servant  in  her  best 
clothes,  or  merely  his  mother. 

Women  do  not  do  everything  in  Ansbach,  however, 
the  sacristans  being  men,  as  the  Marches  found  when 
they  went  to  complete  their  impression  of  the  courtly 
past  of  the  city  by  visiting  the  funeral  chapel  of  the  Mar- 
graves in  the  crypt  of  St.  Johannis's  Church.  In  the  little 
ex-margravely  capital  there  was  something  of  the  neigh- 
borly interest  in  the  curiosity  of  strangers  which  endears 
Italian  witness.  The  white-haired  street-sweeper  of 
Ansbach,  who  willingly  left  his  broom  to  guide  them  to 
the  house  of  the  sacristan,  might  have  been  a  street- 
sweeper  in  Vicenza;  and  the  old  sacristan,  when  he  put 
his  velvet  skull-cap  out  of  an  upper  window  and  professed 
his  willingness  to  show  them  the  chapel,  disappointed 
them  by  saying  "Gleich!"  instead  of  "Subito!"  The 
architecture  of  the  house  was  a  party  to  the  illusion. 
St.  Johannis's,  like  the  older  church  of  St.  Gumpertus,  is 
Gothic,  with  the  two  unequal  towers  which  seem  distinc- 
tive of  Ansbach;  at  the  St.  Gumpertus  end  of  the  place 
where  they  both  stand  the  dwellings  are  Gothic,  too,  and 

might  be  in  Hamburg;  but  at  the  St.  Johannis  end  they 

67 


HITHER  AND  THITHER   IN  GERMANY 

seem  to  have  felt  the  spirit  of  the  court,  and  are  of  a  sort 
of  Teutonized  Renaissance. 

The  baroque  margraves  and  margravines  used,  of 
course,  to  worship  in  St.  Johannis's  Church.  Now  they  all, 
such  as  did  not  marry  abroad,  lie  in  the  crypt  of  the  church, 
in  caskets  of  bronze  and  copper  and  marble,  with  draperies 
of  black  samite,  more  and  more  funerally  vainglorious 
to  the  last.  Their  courtly  coffins  are  ranged  in  a  kind  of 
hemicycle,  with  the  little  coffins  of  the  children  that  died 
before  they  came  to  the  knowledge  of  their  greatness.  On 
one  of  these  a  kneeling  figurine  in  bronze  holds  up  the 
effigy  of  the  child  within;  on  another  the  epitaph  plays 
tenderly  with  the  fate  of  a  little  princess,  who  died  in  her 
first  year. 

In  the  Rose-month  was  this  sweet  Rose  taken. 

For  the  Rose-kind  hath  she  earth  forsaken. 

The  Princess  is  the  Rose,  that  here  no  longer  blows, 

From  the  stem  by  death's  hand  rudely  shaken. 

Then  rest  in  the  Rose-house, 

Little  Princess-Rosebud  dear! 

There  life's  Rose  shall  bloom  again 

In  Heaven's  sunshine  clear. 

While  March  struggled  to  get  this  into  English  words, 
two  German  ladies,  who  had  made  themselves  of  his  party, 
passed  reverently  away  and  left  him  to  pay  the  sacristan 
alone. 

"That  is  all  right,"  he  said,  when  he  came  out.  "I 
think  we  got  the  most  value;  and  they  didn't  look  as  if 
they  could  afford  it  so  well;  though  you  never  can  tell, 
here.  These  ladies  may  be  the  highest  kind  of  rank 
practising  a  praiseworthy  economy.  I  hope  the  lesson 
won't  be  lost  on  us.  They  have  saved  enough  by  us  for 
their  coffee  at  the  Orangery.  Let  us  go  and  have  a  little 

willow-leaf  tea!" 

68 


ANSBACH 

The  Orangery  perpetually  lured  them  by  what  it  had 
kept  of  the  days  when  an  Orangery  was  essential  to  the 
self-respect  of  every  sovereign  prince  and  of  so  many 
private  gentlemen,  and  there  always  awaited  them  in  the 
old  pleasaunce  the  pathos  of  Kaspar  Hauser's  fate, 
which  his  murder  affixes  to  it  with  a  red  stain. 

After  then*  cups  of  willow  leaves  at  the  cafe"  they  went 
up  into  that  nook  of  the  plantation  where  the  simple 
shaft  of  churchwarden's  Gothic  commemorates  the  assas- 
sination on  the  spot  where  it  befell.  Here  the  hapless 
youth  whose  mystery  will  never  be  fathomed  on  earth 
used  to  come  for  a  little  respite  from  his  harsh  guardian 
in  /  isbach,  homesick  for  the  kindness  of  his  Nuremberg 
frie.  Js;  and  here  his  murderer  found  him  and  dealt  him 
the  mortal  blow. 

March  lingered  upon  the  last  sad  circumstance  of  the 
tragedy  in  which  the  wounded  boy  dragged  himself  home, 
to  suffer  the  suspicion  and  neglect  of  his  guardian  till 
death  attested  his  good  faith  beyond  cavil.  He  said  this 
was  the  hardest  thing  to  bear  in  all  his  story,  and  that 
he  would  like  to  have  a  look  into  the  soul  of  the  dull,  un- 
kind wretch  who  had  so  misread  his  charge. 

6 


VI 

WURZBURG 

square  in  front  of  the  station  at  Wiirzburg,  when 
-••  the  Marches  arrived  there,  was  planted  with  flag-poles 
wreathed  in  evergreens;  a  triumphal  arch  was  nearly 
finished,  and  a  colossal  allegory  in  imitation  bronze  was 
well  on  the  way  to  completion,  in  honor  of  the  majesties 
who  were  coming  for  the  maneuvers.  The  streets  which 
the  omnibus  passed  through  to  the  Swan  Inn  were  draped 
with  the  imperial  German  and  the  royal  Bavarian  colors; 
and  the  standards  of  the  visiting  nationalities  decked  the 
fronts  of  the  houses  where  their  military  attaches  were 
lodged. 

The  Swan  Inn  sits  on  one  of  the  long  quays  bordering 
the  Main,  and  its  windows  look  down  upon  the  bridges 
and  shipping  of  the  river;  but  the  traveler  reaches  it 
by  a  door  in  the  rear,  through  an  archway  into  a  back 
street,  where  an  odor  dating  back  to  the  foundation  of  the 
city  is  waiting  to  welcome  him.  The  landlord  was  there, 
too,  and  he  greeted  the  Marches  so  cordially  that  they 
fully  partook  his  grief  in  being  able  to  offer  them  rooms 
on  the  front  of  the  house  for  two  nights  only.  They  recon- 
ciled themselves  to  the  necessity  of  then  turning  out  for 
the  staff  of  the  King  of  Saxony,  the  more  readily  because 
they  knew  that  there  was  no  hope  of  better  things  at  any 
other  hotel. 

The  rooms  which  they  could  have  for  the  time  were 

70 


WURZBURG 

charming,  and  they  came  down  to  supper  in  a  glazed  gal- 
lery looking  out  on  the  river  picturesque  with  craft  of  all 
fashions:  with  rowboats,  sailboats,  and  little  steamers, 
but  mainly  with  long,  black  barges  built  up  into  houses 
in  the  middle,  and  defended  each  by  a  little  nervous 
German  dog.  Long  rafts  of  logs  weltered  in  the  sunset 
red  which  painted  the  swift  current  and  mantled  the 
immeasurable  vineyards  of  the  hills  around  like  the  color  of 
their  ripening  grapes.  Directly  in  face  rose  a  castled  steep, 
which  kept  the  ranging  walls  and  the  bastions  and  battle- 
ments of  the  time  when  such  a  stronghold  could  have 
defended  the  city  from  foes  without  or  from  tumult  with- 
in. The  arches  of  a  stately  bridge  spanned  the  river  sun- 
setward,  and  lifted  a  succession  of  colossal  figures  against 
the  crimson  sky. 

There  proved  to  be  a  general  guide  to  the  city,  and  a 
special  guide,  with  plans  and  personal  details  of  the  ap- 
proaching maneuvers  and  the  princes  who  were  to  figure 
in  them;  and  there  was  a  sketch  of  the  local  history — a 
kind  of  thing  that  the  Germans  know  how  to  write  partic- 
ularly well,  with  little  gleams  of  pleasant  humor  breaking 
through  it.  For  the  study  of  this,  Mrs.  March  realized, 
more  and  more  passionately,  that  they  were  in  the  very 
most  central  and  convenient  point,  for  the  history  of 
Wiirzburg  might  be  said  to  have  begun  with  her  prince- 
bishops,  whose  rule  had  begun  in  the  twelfth  century,  and 
who  had  built,  on  a  forgotten  Roman  work,  the  fortress 
of  the  Marienburg  on  that  vineyarded  hill  over  against 
the  Swan  Inn.  There  had,  of  course,  been  history  before 
that,  but  nothing  so  clear,  nothing  so  peculiarly  swell, 
nothing  that  so  united  the  glory  of  this  world  and  the 
next  as  that  of  the  prince-bishops.  They  had  made  the 
Marienburg  their  home,  and  kept  it  against  foreign  and 
domestic  foes  for  five  hundred  years.  Shut  within  its 

well-fortified  walls,  they  had  awed  the  often-turbulent  city 

71 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

across  the  Main;  they  had  held  it  against  the  embattled 
farmers  in  the  Peasants'  War,  and  had  splendidly  lost  it 
to  Gustavus  Adolphus,  and  then  got  it  back  again  and 
held  it  till  Napoleon  took  it  from  them.  He  gave  it  with 
their  flock  to  the  Bavarians,  who  in  turn  briefly  yielded 
it  to  the  Prussians  in  1866,  and  were  now  in  apparently 
final  possession  of  it. 

Before  the  prince-bishops,  Charlemagne  and  Barbarossa 
had  come  and  gone,  and  since  the  prince-bishops  there 
had  been  visiting  thrones  and  kingdoms  enough  in  the 
ancient  city,  which  was  soon  to  be  illustrated  by  the  pres- 
ence of  imperial  Germany,  royal  Wurtemberg  and  Saxony, 
grand-ducal  Baden  and  Weimar,  and  a  surfeit  of  all  the 
minor  potentates  among  those  who  speak  the  beautiful 
language  of  the  Ja. 

But  none  of  these  could  dislodge  the  prince-bishops  from 
that  supreme  place  which  they  had  at  once  taken  in  Mrs. 
March's  fancy.  The  potentates  were  all  going  to  be 
housed  in  the  vast  palace  which  the  prince-bishops  had 
built  themselves  in  Wtirzburg  as  soon  as  they  found  it 
safe  to  come  down  from  their  stronghold  of  Marienburg, 
and  begin  to  adorn  their  city,  and  to  confirm  it  in  its 
intense  fidelity  to  the  Church.  Tiepolo  had  come  up  out 
of  Italy  to  fresco  their  palace,  where  he  wrought  year  after 
year,  in  that  worldly  taste  which  has  somehow  come  to 
express  the  most  sovereign  moment  of  ecclesiasticism.  It 
prevailed  so  universally  in  Wiirzburg  that  it  left  her  with 
the  name  of  the  Rococo  City,  intrenched  in  a  period  of 
time  equally  remote  from  early  Christianity  and  modern 
Protestantism.  Out  of  her  sixty  thousand  souls,  only 
ten  thousand  are  now  of  the  reformed  religion,  and  these 
bear  about  the  same  relation  to  the  Catholic  spirit  of  the 
place  that  the  Gothic  architecture  bears  to  the  baroque. 

As  long  as  the  prince-bishops  lasted  the  Wiirzburgers 

got  on  very  well  with  but  one  newspaper,  and  perhaps 

72 


WURZBURG 

the  smallest  amount  of  merrymaking  known  outside  of 
the  colony  of  Massachusetts  Bay  at  the  same  epoch.  The 
prince-bishops  had  their  finger  in  everybody's  pie,  and 
they  portioned  out  the  cakes  and  ale,  which  were  made 
according  to  formulas  of  their  own.  The  distractions 
were  all  of  a  religious  character;  churches,  convents, 
monasteries  abounded;  ecclesiastical  processions  and 
solemnities  were  the  spectacles  that  edified  if  they  did 
not  amuse  the  devout  population. 

It  seemed  to  March  an  ironical  outcome  of  all  this 
spiritual  severity  that  one  of  the  greatest  modern  scien- 
tific discoveries  should  have  been  made  in  Wurzburg, 
and  that  the  Rontgen  rays  should  now  be  giving  her  name 
a  splendor  destined  to  eclipse  the  glories  of  her  past. 
Mrs.  March  could  not  allow  that  they  would  do  so;  or, 
at  least,  that  the  name  of  Rontgen  would  ever  lend  more 
luster  to  his  city  than  that  of  Longfellow's  Walther  von 
der  Vogelweide.  She  was  no  less  surprised  than  pleased 
to  realize  that  this  friend  of  the  birds  was  a  Wurzburger, 
and  she  said  that  their  first  pilgrimage  in  the  morning 
should  be  to  the  church  where  he  lies  buried. 

The  thoroughfare  which  they  emerged  upon,  with  the 
cathedral  ending  the  perspective,  was  full  of  the  holiday 
so  near  at  hand.  The  narrow  sidewalks  were  thronged 
with  people,  both  soldiers  and  civilians,  and  up  the  middle 
of  the  street  detachments  of  military  came  and  went, 
halting  the  little  horse-cars  and  the  huge  beer-wagons 
which  otherwise  seemed  to  have  the  sole  right  to  the  streets 
of  Wiirzburg;  they  came  jingling  or  thundering  out  of 
the  side  streets  and  hurled  themselves  round  the  corners, 
reckless  of  the  passers,  who  escaped  alive  by  flattening 
themselves  like  posters  against  the  house  walls.  There 
were  peasants,  men  and  women,  in  the  costume  which  the 
unbroken  course  of  their  country  life  had  kept  as  quaint 

as  it  was  a  hundred  years  before;  there  were  citizens  in 

73 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

\ 

the  misfits  of  the  latest  German  fashions;  there  were 
soldiers  of  all  arms  in  their  vivid  uniforms,  and  from  time 
to  time  there  were  pretty  young  girls  in  white  dresses 
with  low  necks,  and  bare  arms  gloved  to  the  elbows,  who 
were  following  a  holiday  custom  of  the  place  in  going 
about  the  streets  in  ball  costume.  The  shop  windows 
were  filled  with  portraits  of  the  Emperor  and  the  Em- 
press, and  the  Prince-Regent  and  the  ladies  of  his 
family;  the  German  and  Bavarian  colors  draped  the 
fagades  of  the  houses  and  festooned  the  fantastic  Ma- 
donnas posing  above  so  many  portals.  The  modern 
patriotism  included  the  ancient  piety  without  dis- 
turbing it;  the  Rococo  City  remained  ecclesiastical 
through  its  new  imperialism,  and  kept  the  stamp  given 
it  by  the  long  rule  of  the  prince-bishops  under  the  sover- 
eignty of  its  King  and  the  suzerainty  of  its  Kaiser. 

The  Marches  escaped  from  the  present,  when  they 
entered  the  cathedral,  as  wholly  as  if  they  had  taken  hold 
of  the  horns  of  the  altar,  though  they  were  far  from  liter- 
ally doing  this  in  an  interior  so  grandiose.  There  are  a  few 
churches  in  Italy,  and  perhaps  more  in  Spain,  which  ap- 
proach the  perfection  achieved  by  the  Wurzburg  cathe- 
dral hi  the  baroque  style.  For  once  one  sees  what  that 
style  can  do  in  architecture  and  sculpture,  and  whatever 
one  may  say  of  the  details,  one  cannot  deny  that  there  is 
a  prodigiously  effective  keeping  in  it  all.  This  interior 
came  together,  as  the  decorators  say,  with  a  harmony 
that  the  travelers  had  felt  nowhere  in  their  earlier  ex- 
perience of  the  baroque.  It  was  unimpeachably  perfect 
in  its  way.  "Just,"  March  murmured  to  his  wife,  "as  the 
social  and  political  and  scientific  scheme  of  the  eighteenth 
century  was  perfected  in  certain  tunes  and  places.  But 
the  odd  thing  is  to  find  the  apotheosis  of  the  baroque  away 
up  here  in  Germany.  I  wonder  how  much  the  prince- 
bishops  really  liked  it.  But  they  had  become  baroque, too! 

74 


WURZBURG 

Look  at  that  row  of  their  statues  on  both  sides  of  the  nave! 
What  magnificent  swells!  How  they  abash  this  poor  plain 
Christ,  here;  he  would  like  to  get  behind  the  pillar;  he 
knows  that  he  could  never  lend  himself  to  the  baroque 
style.  It  expresses  the  eighteenth  century,  though.  But 
how  you  long  for  some  little  hint  of  the  thirteenth,  or 
even  the  nineteenth!" 

"I  don't,"  she  whispered  back.  "I'm  perfectly  wild 
about  Wurzburg.  I  like  to  have  a  thing  go  as  far  as  it  can. 
At  Nuremberg  I  wanted  all  the  Gothic  I  could  get,  and 
in  Wurzburg  I  want  all  the  baroque  I  can  get.  I  am 
consistent." 

She  kept  on  praising  herself  to  his  disadvantage,  as 
women  do,  all  the  way  to  the  Neumiinster  Church,  where 
they  were  going  to  revere  the  tomb  of  Walther  von  der 
Vogelweide,  not  so  much  for  his  own  sake  as  for  Long- 
fellow's. The  older  poet  lies  buried  within,  but  his  monu- 
ment is  outside, the  church,  perhaps  for  the  greater  con- 
venience of  the  sparrows,  which  now  represent  the  birds 
he  loved.  The  cenotaph  is  surmounted  by  a  broad  vase, 
and  around  this  are  thickly  perched  the  effigies  of  the 
Meistersinger's  feathered  friends,  from  whom  the  canons 
of  the  church,  as  Mrs.  March  read  aloud  from  her  Bae- 
deker, long  ago  directed  his  bequest  to  themselves.  In 
revenge  for  their  lawless  greed,  the  defrauded  beneficiaries 
choose  to  burlesque  the  affair  by  looking  like  the  four-and- 
twenty  blackbirds  when  the  pie  was  opened. 

She  consented  to  go  for  a  moment  to  the  Gothic  Mar- 
ienkapelle  with  her  husband  in  the  revival  of  his  medieval 
taste,  and  she  was  rewarded  amid  its  thirteenth-century 
sincerity  by  his  recantation.  "You  are  right!  Baroque  is 
the  thing  for  Wurzburg;  one  can't  enjoy  Gothic  here  any 
more  than  one  could  enjoy  baroque  in  Nuremberg." 

Reconciled  in  the  baroque,  they  now  called  a  carriage 

and  went  to  visit  the  palace  of  the  prince-bishops  who  had 

75 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

so  well  known  how  to  make  the  heavenly  take  the  image 
and  superscription  of  the  worldly;  and  they  were  jointly 
indignant  to  find  it  shut  against  the  public  in  preparation 
for  the  imperialities  and  royalties  coming  to  occupy  it. 
They  were  in  time  for  the  noon  guard-mounting,  however, 
and  Mrs.  March  said  that  the  way  the  retiring  squad 
kicked  their  legs  out  in  the  high  martial  step  of  the  Ger- 
man soldiers  was  a  perfect  expression  of  the  insolent  mil- 
itarism of  their  empire,  and  was  of  itself  enough  to  make 
one  thank  Heaven  that  one  was  an  American  and  a  repub- 
lican. She  softened  a  little  toward  their  system  when  it 
proved  that  the  garden  of  the  palace  was  still  open,  and 
yet  more  when  she  sank  down  upon  a  bench  between  two 
marble  groups  representing  the  Rape  of  Proserpine  and 
the  Rape  of  Europa.  These  stood  each  in  a  graveled  plot, 
thickly  overrun  by  a  growth  of  ivy,  and  the  vine  climbed 
the  white,  naked  limbs  of  the  nymphs,  who  were  present 
on  a  pretense  of  gathering  flowers,  but  really  to  pose  at 
the  spectators,  and  clad  them  to  the  waist  and  shoulders 
with  an  effect  of  modesty  never  meant  by  the  sculptor, 
but  not  displeasing.  There  was  an  old  fountain  near,  its 
stone  rim  and  center  of  rockwork  green  with  immemorial 
mold,  and  its  basin  quivering  between  its  water-plants 
under  the  soft  fall  of  spray.  At  a  waft  of  fitful  breeze  some 
leaves  of  early  autumn  fell  from  the  trees  overhead  upon 
the  elderly  pair  where  they  sat,  and  a  little  company  of 
sparrows  came  and  hopped  about  their  feet.  Though  the 
square  without  was  so  all  astir  with  festive  expectation, 
there  were  few  people  in  the  garden;  three  or  four  peasant 
women  in  densely  fluted  white  skirts  and  red  aprons  and 
shawls  wandered  by  and  stared  at  the  Europa  and  at  the 
Proserpine. 

They  had  reached  the  balustraded  terrace,  and  were 
pausing  for  pleasure  in  the  garden-tops  below,  with  the 

flowery  spaces  and  the  statued  fountains  all  coming  to- 

76 


WURZBURG 

gether.  She  put  her  hand  on  one  of  the  fat  little  urchin- 
groups  on  the  stone  coping.  "I  don't  want  cherubs  when 
I  can  have  these  putti.  And  those  old  prince-bishops 
didn't,  either!" 

"I  don't  suppose  they  kept  a  New  England  conscience," 
he  said,  with  a  vague  smile.  "  It  would  be  difficult  in  the 
presence  of  the  baroque." 

They  left  the  garden  through  the  beautiful  gate  which 
the  old  court  ironsmith  Oegg  hammered  out  in  lovely 
forms  of  leaves  and  flowers,  and  shaped  laterally  up- 
ward, as  lightly  as  if  with  a  waft  of  his  hand,  in  gracious 
Louis  Quinze  curves;  and  they  looked  back  at  it  in  the 
kind  of  despair  which  any  perfection  inspires.  They  said 
how  feminine  it  was,  how  exotic,  how  expressive  of  a 
luxurious  ideal  of  life  which  art  had  purified  and  left 
eternally  charming.  They  remembered  their  Ruskinian 
youth,  and  the  confidence  with  which  they  would  once 
have  condemned  it;  and  they  had  a  sense  of  recreancy 
in  now  admiring  it;  but  they  certainly  admired  it,  and 
it  remained  for  them  the  supreme  expression  of  that  time- 
soul,  mundane,  courtly,  aristocratic,  flattering,  which  once 
influenced  the  art  of  the  whole  world,  and  which  had  here 
so  curiously  found  its  apotheosis  in  a  city  remote  from  its 
native  place  and  under  a  rule  sacerdotally  vowed  to  aus- 
terity. The  vast  superb  palace  of  the  prince-bishops, 
which  was  now  to  house  a  whole  troop  of  sovereigns,  im- 
perial, royal,  grand  ducal  and  ducal,  dwelt  aloft  in  superb 
amplitude;  but  it  did  not  realize  their  historic  pride  so 
effectively  as  this  exquisite  work  of  the  court  ironsmith. 
It  related  in  its  aerial  beauty  to  that  of  the  Tiepolo  frescoes 
which  the  travelers  knew  were  swimming  and  soaring  on 
the  ceilings  within,  and  from  which  it  seemed  to  accent 
their  exclusion  with  a  delicate  irony,  March  said.  "Or 
ironmongery,"  he  corrected  himself,  upon  reflection. 

As  they  drove  away  from  the  palace  he  said:  "We're 

77 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

promised  something  at  the  Volksfest  which  will  be  a  great 
novelty  to  us  as  Americans.  Our  driver  tells  me  that  one 
of  the  houses  there  was  built  entirely  of  wood." 

When  they  reached  the  grounds  of  the  Volksfest,  this 
civil  feature  of  the  great  military  event  at  hand,  which 
the  Marches  had  found  largely  set  forth  in  the  program 
of  the  parade,  did  not  otherwise  fully  keep  the  glowing 
promises  made  for  it;  in  fact,  it  could  not  easily  have 
done  so.  It  was  in  a  pleasant  neighborhood  of  new  villas 
such  as  form  the  modern  quarter  of  every  German  city, 
and  the  Volksfest  was  even  more  unfinished  than  its  en- 
vironment. It  was  not  yet  inclosed  by  the  fence  which 
was  to  hide  its  wonders  from  the  non-paying  public,  and 
Mrs.  March  preferred  going  in  to  the  hotel,  but  March 
went  in  through  an  archway  where  the  gate-money  was  as 
effectually  collected  from  him  as  if  he  were  barred  every 
other  entrance. 

The  wooden  building  was  easily  distinguishable  from 
the  other  edifices  because  these  were  tents  and  booths 
still  less  substantial.  He  did  not  make  out  its  function, 
but  of  the  others  four  sheltered  merry-go-rounds,  four 
were  beer-gardens,  four  were  restaurants,  and  the  rest 
were  devoted  to  amusements  of  the  usual  country-fair 
type.  Apparently  they  had  little  attraction  for  country 
people.  March  met  few  peasants  in  the  grounds,  and 
neither  at  the  Edison  kinematograph,  where  he  refreshed 
his  patriotism  with  some  scenes  of  their  native  life,  nor 
at  the  little  theater  where  he  saw  the  sports  of  the  arena 
revived  in  the  wrestle  of  a  woman  with  a  bear,  did  any  of 
the  people  except  tradesmen  and  artisans  seem  to  be  taking 
part  in  the  festival  expression  of  the  popular  pleasure. 

The  woman,  who  finally  threw  the  bear,  whether  by 
sleight,  or  by  main  strength,  or  by  a  previous  understand- 
ing with  him,  was  a  slender  creature,  pathetically  small 

and  not  altogether  plain;  and  March  as  he  walked  away 

78 


WURZBURG 

lapsed  into  a  pensive  muse  upon  her  strange  employ.  He 
wondered  how  she  came  to  take  it  up,  and  whether  she 
began  with  the  bear  when  they  were  both  very  young  and 
she  could  easily  throw  him. 

The  draft  of  universal  interest  toward  the  Kaiser- 
strasse  had  left  the  other  streets  almost  deserted,  but  as 
he  approached  the  thoroughfare  he  found  all  the  ways 
blocked,  and  the  horse-cars,  ordinarily  so  furiously  head- 
long, arrested  by  the  multiple  ranks  of  spectators  on  the 
sidewalks.  The  avenue  leading  from  the  railway  station 
to  the  palace  was  decorated  with  flags  and  garlands,  and 
planted  with  the  stems  of  young  firs  and  birches.  The 
doorways  were  crowded,  and  the  windows  dense  with 
eager  faces  peering  out  of  the  draped  bunting.  The  car- 
riageway was  kept  clear  by  mild  policemen  who  now 
and  then  allowed  one  of  the  crowd  to  cross  it. 

The  crowd  was  made  up  mostly  of  women  and  boys, 
and  when  March  joined  them  they  had  already  been  wait- 
ing an  hour  for  the  sight  of  the  princes  who  were  to  bless 
them  with  a  vision  of  the  faery  race  which  kings  always 
are  to  common  men.  He  thought  the  people  looked  dull, 
and  therefore  able  to  bear  the  strain  of  expectation  with 
patience  better  than  a  livelier  race.  They  relieved  it  by 
no  attempt  at  joking;  here  and  there  a  dim  smile  dawned 
on  a  weary  face,  but  it  seemed  an  effect  of  amiability 
rather  than  humor.  There  was  so  little  of  this,  or  else  it 
was  so  well  bridled  by  the  solemnity  of  the  occasion,  that 
not  a  man,  woman,  or  child  laughed  when  a  bareheaded 
maid-servant  broke  through  the  lines  and  ran  down  be- 
tween them  with  a  life-size  plaster  bust  of  the  German 
Kaiser  in  her  arms;  she  carried  it  like  an  overgrown  infant, 
and  in  alarm  at  her  conspicuous  part  she  cast  frightened 
looks  from  side  to  side  without  arousing  any  sort  of  notice. 
Undeterred  by  her  failure,  a  young  dog,  parted  from  his 

owner  and  seeking  him  hi  the  crowd,  pursued  his  search  in 

79 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

a  wild  flight  down  the  guarded  roadway  with  an  air  of 
anxiety  that  in  America  would  have  won  him  thunders  of 
applause  and  all  sorts  of  kindly  encouragements  to  greater 
speed.  But  the  German  crowd  witnessed  his  progress  ap- 
parently without  interest,  and  without  a  sign  of  pleasure. 
They  were  there  to  see  the  Prince-Regent  arrive,  and  they 
did  not  suffer  themselves  to  be  distracted  by  any  prelim- 
inary excitement.  Suddenly  the  indefinable  emotion  which 
expresses  the  fulfilment  of  expectation  in  a  waiting  crowd 
passed  through  the  multitude,  and  before  he  realized  it 
March  was  looking  into  the  friendly  gray-bearded  face  of 
the  Prince-Regent  for  the  moment  that  his  carriage  allowed 
in  passing.  This  came  first,  preceded  by  four  outriders,  and 
followed  by  other  simple  equipages  of  Bavarian  blue  full 
of  highnesses  of  all  grades.  Beside  the  Regent  sat  his 
daughter-in-law,  the  Princess  Maria,  her  silvered  hair 
framing  a  face  as  plain  and  good  as  the  Regent's,  if  not 
so  intelligent. 

He,  in  virtue  of  having  been  born  in  Wiirzburg,  was 
officially  supposed  to  be  specially  beloved  by  his  fellow- 
townsmen;  and  they  now  testified  their  affection  as  he 
whirled  through  their  ranks,  bowing  right  and  left,  by 
what  passes  in  Germany  for  a  cheer.  It  is  the  word  Hoch, 
groaned  forth  from  abdominal  depths,  and  dismally  pro- 
longed in  a  hollow  roar  like  that  which  the  mob  makes 
behind  the  scenes  at  the  theater  before  bursting  in  visible 
tumult  on  the  stage.  Then  the  crowd  dispersed,  and 
March  came  away  wondering  why  such  a  kindly-looking 
Prince-Regent  should  not  have  given  them  a  little  longer 
sight  of  himself,  after  they  had  waited  so  patiently  for 
hours  to  see  him.  But  doubtless  in  those  countries,  he 
concluded,  the  art  of  keeping  the  sovereign  precious  by 
suffering  him  to  be  rarely  and  briefly  seen  is  wisely 
studied. 

The  imperial  party  was  to  arrive  the  next  morning  at 

80 


WURZBURG 

half  past  seven,  but  at  six  the  crowd  was  already  dense 
before  the  station,  and  all  along  the  street  leading  to  the 
Residenz.  It  was  a  brilliant  day,  with  the  promise  of  sun- 
shine, through  which  a  chilly  wind  blew,  for  the  maneu- 
vers. The  colors  of  all  the  German  states  flapped  in  this 
breeze  from  the  poles  wreathed  with  evergreen  which  en- 
circled the  square;  the  workmen  putting  the  last  touches 
on  the  bronzed  allegory  hurried  madly  to  be  done,  and 
they  had  scarcely  finished  their  labors  when  two  troops  of 
dragoons  rode  into  the  place  and  formed  before  the  station 
and  waited  as  motionlessly  as  their  horses  would  allow. 

These  animals  were  not  so  conscious  as  lions  at  the  ap- 
proach of  princes;  they  tossed  and  stamped  impatiently 
in  the  long  interval  before  the  Regent  and  his  daughter- 
in-law  came  to  welcome  their  guests.  All  the  human  beings, 
both  those  who  were  in  charge  and  those  who  were  under 
charge,  were  in  a  quiver  of  anxiety  to  play  their  parts 
well,  as  if  there  were  some  heavy  penalty  for  failure  in  the 
least  point.  The  policemen  keeping  the  people  in  line  be- 
hind the  ropes  which  restrained  them  trembled  with  eager- 
ness; the  faces  of  some  of  the  troopers  twitched.  An  in- 
voluntary sigh  went  up  from  the  crowd  as  the  Regent's 
carriage  appeared,  heralded  by  outriders,  and  followed  by 
other  plain  carriages  of  Bavarian  blue  with  liveries  of 
blue  and  silver.  Then  the  whistle  of  the  Kaiser's  train 
sounded;  a  trumpeter  advanced  and  began  to  blow  his 
trumpet  as  they  do  in  the  theater;  and  exactly  at  the 
appointed  moment  the  Emperor  and  Empress  came  out 
of  the  station  through  the  brilliant  human  alley  leading 
from  it,  mounted  their  carriages,  with  the  stage  trumpeter 
always  blowing,  and  whirled  swiftly  round  half  the  square 
and  flashed  into  the  corner  toward  the  Residenz  out  of 
sight.  The  same  hollow  groans  of  Ho-o-o-o-ch  greeted  and 
followed  them  from  the  spectators  as  had  welcomed  the 
Regent  when  he  first  arrived  among  his  fellow-townsmen, 

81 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

with  the  same  effect  of  being  the  conventional  cries  of  a 
stage  mob  behind  the  scenes. 

The  Emperor  was  like  most  of  his  pictures,  with  a 
swarthy  face  from  which  his  blue  eyes  glanced  pleasantly; 
he  looked  good-humored  if  not  good-natured;  the  Em- 
press smiled  amiably  beneath  her  deeply  fringed  white 
parasol,  and  they  both  bowed  right  and  left  in  acknowl- 
edgment of  those  hollow  groans;  but  again  it  seemed  to 
March  that  sovereignty  gave  the  popular  curiosity,  not 
to  call  it  devotion,  a  scantier  return  than  it  merited.  He 
had  perhaps  been  insensibly  working  toward  some  such 
perception  as  now  came  to  him  that  the  great  difference 
between  Europe  and  America  was  that  in  Europe  life  is 
histrionic  and  dramatized,  and  that  in  America,  except 
when  it  is  trying  to  be  European,  it  is  direct  and  sincere. 
He  wondered  whether  the  innate  conviction  of  equality, 
the  deep,  underlying  sense  of  a  common  humanity  tran- 
scending all  social  and  civic  pretenses,  was  what  gave  their 
theatrical  effect  to  the  shows  of  deference  from  low  to 
high,  and  of  condescension  from  high  to  low.  If  in  such 
encounters  of  sovereigns  and  subjects  the  prince  did  not 
play  his  part  so  well  as  the  people,  it  might  be  that  he 
had  a  harder  part  to  play,  and  that  to  support  his  dignity 
at  all,  to  keep  from  being  found  out  the  sham  that  he 
essentially  was,  he  had  to  hurry  across  the  stage  amid  the 
distracting  thunders  of  the  orchestra.  If  the  star  stayed 
to  be  scrutinized  by  the  soldiers,  citizens,  and  so  forth, 
even  the  poor  supernumeraries  and  scene-shifters  might 
see  that  he  was  a  tallow  candle  like  themselves. 


VII 

WEIMAR 

THE  tide  of  travel  was  now  swelling  toward  Frankfort, 
where  the  grand  parade  was  to  take  place  some  days 
later.  But  the  Marches  had  decided  rather  upon  going  to 
Weimar,  which  was  so  few  hours  out  of  their  way  that 
they  simply  must  not  miss  it;  and  all  the  way  on  their 
journey  to  the  old  literary  capital  they  were  alone  in  their 
compartment,  with  not  even  a  stranger,  much  less  a  friend, 
to  molest  them.  The  flying  landscape  without  was  of  their 
own  early  autumnal  mood,  and  when  the  vineyards  of 
Wiirzburg  ceased  to  purple  it,  the  heavy  aftermath  of 
hay  and  clover,  which  men,  women  and  children  were 
loading  on  heavy  warns,  and  driving  from  the  meadows 
everywhere,  offered  a  pastoral  and  pleasing  change.  It 
was  always  the  German  landscape;  sometimes  flat  and 
fertile,  sometimes  hilly  and  poor;  often  clothed  with 
dense  woods,  but  always  charming,  with  castled  tops  in 
ruin  or  repair,  and  with  levels  where  Gothic  villages 
drowsed  within  their  walls,  and  dreamed  of  the  medieval 
past,  silent,  without  apparent  life,  except  for  some  little 
goose-girl  driving  her  flock  before  her  as  she  sallied  out 
into  the  nineteenth  century  in  search  of  fresh  pasturage. 
As  their  train  mounted  among  the  Thuringian  uplands 
they  were  aware  of  a  finer,  cooler  air  through  their  open 
windows.  The  torrents  foamed  white  out  of  the  black 

forests  of  fir  and  pine,  and  brawled  along  the  valleys, 

83 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

where  the  hamlets  roused  themselves  in  momentary 
curiosity  as  the  train  roared  into  them  from  the  many 
tunnels.  The  afternoon  sunshine  had  the  glister  of  moun- 
tain sunshine  everywhere,  and  the  travelers  had  a  pleas- 
ant bewilderment  in  which  their  memories  of  Switzerland 
and  the  White  Mountains  mixed  with  long-dormant  emo- 
tions from  Adirondack  sojourns. 

It  was  falling  night  when  they  reached  Weimar,  where 
they  found  at  the  station  a  provision  of  omnibuses  far 
beyond  the  hotel  accommodations.  They  drove  first  to 
The  Crown-Prince,  which  was  in  a  promising  state  of 
repair,  but  which  for  the  present  could  only  welcome 
them  to  an  apartment  where  a  canvas  curtain  cut  them 
off  from  a  freshly  plastered  wall.  The  landlord  deplored 
the  fact,  and  sent  hospitably  out  to  try  and  place  them 
at  The  Elephant.  But  The  Elephant  was  full,  and  The 
Russian  Court  was  full,  too.  Then  the  landlord  of  The 
Crown-Prince  bethought  himself  of  a  new  hotel,  of  the 
second  class,  indeed,  but  very  nice,  where  they  might  get 
rooms,  and  after  the  delay  of  an  hour  they  got  a  carriage 
and  drove  away  from  The  Crown-Prince,  where  the  land- 
lord continued  to  the  last  as  benevolent  as  if  they  had 
been  a  profit  instead  of  a  loss  to  him. 

The  streets  of  the  town  at  nine  o'clock  were  empty  and 
quiet,  and  they  instantly  felt  the  academic  quality  of  the 
place.  Through  the  pale  night  they  could  see  that  the 
architecture  was  of  the  classic  sentiment  which  they  were 
destined  to  feel  more  and  more;  at  one  point  they  caught 
a  fleeting  glimpse  of  two  figures  with  clasped  hands  and 
half  embraced,  which  they  knew  for  the  statues  of  Goethe 
and  Schiller;  and  when  they  mounted  to  their  rooms  at 
The  Grand  Duke  of  Saxe-Weimar,  they  passed  under  a 
fresco  representing  Goethe  and  four  other  world-famous 
poets — Shakspere,  Milton,  Tasso,  and  Schiller.  The  poets 

all  looked  like  Germans,  as  was  just,  and  Goethe  was  natu- 

84 


Copyright  by  Underwood  &  Underwood 
WEIMAR 
Schiller's  house,  where  the  poet  spent  his  laat  years 


WEIMAR 

rally  chief  among  them;  he  marshaled  the  immortals  on 
their  way,  and  Schiller  brought  up  the  rear  and  kept  them 
from  going  astray  in  an  Elysium  where  they  did  not  speak 
the  language.  For  the  rest,  the  hotel  was  brand-new,  of 
a  quite  American  freshness,  and  was  pervaded  by  a  sweet 
smell  as  of  straw  matting  and  provided  with  steam-radia- 
tors. In  the  sense  of  its  homelikeness  the  Marches  boasted 
that  they  were  never  going  away  from  it. 

In  the  morning  they  discovered  that  their  windows 
looked  out  on  the  grand-ducal  museum,  with  a  gardened 
space  before  and  below  its  classicistic  bulk,  where,  in 
a  whim  of  the  weather,  the  gay  flowers  were  full  of  sun. 
In  a  pleasant  illusion  of  taking  it  unawares,  March  strolled 
up  through  the  town;  but  Weimar  was  as  much  awake 
at  that  hour  as  at  any  of  the  twenty-four,  and  the  tran- 
quillity of  its  streets,  where  he  encountered  a  few  passers 
several  blocks  apart,  was  their  habitual  mood.  He  came 
promptly  upon  two  objects  which  he  would  willingly  have 
shunned:  a  denkmal  of  the  Franco-German  war,  not  so 
furiously  bad  as  most  German  monuments,  but  anti- 
pathetic and  uninteresting,  as  all  patriotic  monuments  are; 
and  a  woman-and-dog  team.  In  the  shock  from  this  he 
was  sensible  that  he  had  not  seen  any  woman-and-dog 
teams  for  some  time,  and  he  wondered  by  what  civic  or 
ethnic  influences  their  distribution  was  so  controlled  that 
they  should  have  abounded  in  Hamburg,  Leipsic,  and 
Carlsbad,  and  wholly  ceased  in  Nuremberg,  Ansbach,  and 
Wiirzburg,  to  reappear  again  in  Weimar,  though  they 
seemed  as  characteristic  of  all  Germany  as  the  ugly  denk- 
mals  to  her  victories  over  France. 

The  Goethe  and  Schiller  monument  which  he  had 
glimpsed  the  night  before  was  characteristic,  too,  but  less 
offensively  so.  German  statues  at  the  best  are  conscious; 
and  the  poet-pair,  as  the  inscription  calls  them,  have  the 
air  of  showily  confronting  posterity  with  their  clasped 
7  85 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

/ 

hands,  and  of  being  only  partially  rapt  from  the  spectators. 
But  they  were  more  unconscious  than  any  other  German 
statues  that  March  had  seen,  and  he  quelled  a  desire  to 
ask  Goethe,  as  he  stood  with  his  hand  on  Schiller's  shoul- 
der and  looked  serenely  into  space  far  above  one  of  the 
typical  equipages  of  his  country,  what  he  thought  of  that 
sort  of  thing.  But  upon  reflection  he  did  not  know  why 
Goethe  should  be  held  personally  responsible  for  the  ex- 
istence of  the  woman-and-dog  team.  He  felt  that  he  might 
more  reasonably  attribute  to  his  taste  the  prevalence  of 
classic  profiles  which  he  began  to  note  in  the  Weimar 
populace.  This  could  be  a  sympathetic  effect  of  the  passion 
for  the  antique  which  the  poet  brought  back  with  him, 
from  his  sojourn  in  Italy;  though  many  of  the  people, 
especially  the  children,  were  bow-legged.  Perhaps  the 
antique  had  begun  in  their  faces,  and  had  not  yet  got 
down  to  their  legs;  in  any  case,  they  were  charming  chil- 
dren, and  as  a  test  of  then"  culture  he  had  a  mind  to  ask 
a  little  girl  if  she  could  tell  him  where  the  statue  of  Herder 
was,  which  he  thought  he  might  as  well  take  in  on  his 
ramble  and  so  be  done  with  as  many  statues  as  he  could. 
She  answered  with  a  pretty  regret  in  her  tender  voice, 
"That  I  truly  cannot,"  and  he  was  more  satisfied  than 
if  she  could,  for  he  thought  it  better  to  be  a  child  and 
honest  than  to  know  where  any  German  statue  was. 

He  easily  found  it  for  himself  in  the  place  which  is  called 
the  Herder  Platz,  after  it.  He  went  into  the  Peter  and 
Paul  Church  there,  where  Herder  used  to  preach  sermons, 
sometimes  not  at  all  liked  by  the  nobility  and  gentry  for 
their  revolutionary  tendency;  the  sovereign  was  shielded 
from  the  worst  effects  of  his  doctrine  by  worshiping 
apart  from  other  sinners  in  a  glazed  gallery.  Herder  is 
buried  in  the  church,  and  when  you  ask  where,  the  sacristan 
lifts  a  wooden  trap-door  in  the  pavement,  and  you  think 

you  are  going  down  into  the  crypt,  but  you  are  only  to 

86 


WEIMAR 

see  Herder's  monumental  stone,  which  is  kept  covered  so 
as  to  save  it  from  passing  feet.  Here  also  is  the  greatest 
picture  of  that  great  soul  Luke  Kranach,  who  had  sincer- 
ity enough  in  his  paintiag  to  atone  for  all  the  swelling 
German  sculptures  in  the  world.  It  is  a  crucifixion,  and 
the  cross  is  of  a  white  birch  log,  such  as  might  have  been 
cut  out  of  the  Weimar  woods,  shaved  smooth  on  the  sides, 
with  the  bark  showing  at  the  edges.  Kranach  has  put 
himself  among  the  spectators,  and  a  stream  of  blood  from 
the  side  of  the  Saviour  falls  in  baptism  upon  the  painter's 
head.  He  is  in  the  company  of  John  the  Baptist  and  Mar- 
tin Luther;  Luther  stands  with  his  Bible  open  and  his 
finger  on  the  line,  "The  blood  of  Jesus  cleanseth  us." 

It  was  like  a  day  of  late  spring  in  Italy  or  America;  the 
sun  in  that  gardened  hollow  before  the  museum  was 
already  hot  enough  to  make  him  glad  of  the  shelter  of 
the  hotel.  The  summer  seemed  to  have  come  back  to 
oblige  them,  and  when  they  learned  that  they  were  to 
see  Weimar  in  a  festive  mood  because  this  was  Sedan 
Day,  their  curiosity,  if  not  their  sympathy,  accepted  the 
chance  gratefully.  But  they  were  almost  moved  to  wish 
that  the  war  had  gone  otherwise  when  they  learned  that 
all  the  public  carriages  were  engaged,  and  they  must  have 
one  from  a  stable  if  they  wished  to  drive  after  breakfast. 
Still,  it  was  offered  them  for  such  a  modest  number  of 
marks,  and  their  driver  proved  so  friendly  and  convers- 
able, that  they  assented  to  the  course  of  history,  and  were 
more  and  more  reconciled  as  they  bowled  along  through 
the  grand-ducal  park  beside  the  waters  of  the  classic  Ilm. 

The  waters  of  the  classic  Ilm  are  sluggish  and  slimy  in 
places,  and  in  places  clear  and  brooklike,  but  always  a 
dark  green  in  color.  They  flow  in  the  shadow  of  pensive 
trees,  and  by  the  brinks  of  sunny  meadows,  where  the 
aftermath  wanders  in  heavy  windrows,  and  the  children 

sport  joyously  over  the  smooth-mown  surfaces  in  all  the 

87 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

freedom  that  there  is  in  Germany.  At  last,  after  imme- 
morial appropriation,  the  owners  of  the  earth  are  every- 
where expropriated,  and  the  people  come  into  the  pleasure 
if  not  the  profit  of  it.  At  last  the  prince,  the  knight,  the 
noble  finds,  as  in  his  turn  the  plutocrat  will  find,  that  his 
property  is  not  for  him,  but  for  all;  and  that  the  nation 
is  to  enjoy  what  he  takes  from  it  and  vainly  thinks  to 
keep  from  it.  Parks,  pleasaunces,  gardens,  set  apart  for 
kings,  are  the  playgrounds  of  the  landless  poor  in  the 
Old  World,  and  perhaps  yield  the  sweetest  joy  of  privilege 
to  some  state-sick  ruler,  some  world-weary  princess,  some 
lonely  child  born  to  the  solitude  of  sovereignty,  as  they 
each  look  down  from  their  palace  windows  upon  the 
leisure  of  overwork  taking  its  little  holiday  amid  beauty 
vainly  created  for  the  perpetual  festival  of  their  empty 
lives. 

March  smiled  to  think  that  in  this  very  Weimar,  where 
sovereignty  had  graced  and  ennobled  itself  as  nowhere 
else  in  the  world  by  the  companionship  of  letters  and  the 
arts,  they  still  were  not  hurrying  first  to  see  the  palace  of 
a  prince,  but  were  involuntarily  making  it  second  to  the 
cottage  of  a  poet.  But,  in  fact,  it  is  Goethe  who  is  forever 
the  prince  in  Weimar.  His  greatness  blots  out  its  history, 
his  name  fills  the  city;  the  thought  of  him  is  its  chief est 
invitation  and  largest  hospitality. 

The  travelers  remembered,  above  all  other  facts  of 
the  grand-ducal  park,  that  it  was  there  he  first  met 
Christiane  Vulpius,  beautiful  and  young,  when  he,  too, 
was  beautiful  and  young,  and  took  her  home  to  be  his 
love,  to  the  just  and  lasting  displeasure  of  Frau  von  Stein, 
who  was  even  less  reconciled  when,  after  eighteen  years 
of  due  reflection,  the  love  of  Goethe  and  Christiane  be- 
came their  marriage.  They  wondered  just  where  it  was 
he  saw  the  young  girl  coming  to  meet  him  as  the  Grand 
Duke's  minister  with  an  office-seeking  petition  from  her 


WEIMAR 

brother,  Goethe's  brother  author,  long  famed  and  long 
forgotten  for  his  romantic  tale  of  Rinaldo  Rinaldini. 
They  had,  indeed,  no  great  mind,  in  their  American  re- 
spectability, for  that  rather  matter-of-fact  and  deliberate 
liaison,  and  little  as  their  sympathy  was  for  the  passion- 
less intellectual  intrigue  with  the  Frau  von  Stein,  it  cast 
no  halo  of  sentiment  about  the  Goethe  cottage  to  suppose 
that  there  his  love-life  with  Christiane  began. 

In  spite  of  our  facile  and  multiple  divorces,  we  Ameri- 
cans are  worshipers  of  marriage,  and  if  a  great  poet,  the 
minister  of  a  prince,  is  going  to  marry  a  poor  girl,  we 
think  he  had  better  not  wait  till  their  son  is  almost  of  age. 
Mrs.  March  would  not  accept  as  extenuating  circum- 
stances the  Grand  Duke's  godfatherhood,  or  Goethe's 
open  constancy  to  Christiane,  or  the  tardy  consecration 
of  their  union  after  the  French  sack  of  Weimar,  when  the 
girl's  devotion  had  saved  him  from  the  rudeness  of  the 
marauding  soldiers.  For  her  New  England  soul  there 
were  no  degrees  in  such  guilt,  and  perhaps  there  are  really 
not  so  many  as  people  have  tried  to  think  in  their  defer- 
ence to  Goethe's  greatness.  But  certainly  the  affair  was 
not  so  simple  for  a  grand-ducal  minister  of  world-wide 
renown,  and  he  might  well  have  felt  its  difficulties,  for  he 
could  not  have  been  proof  against  the  censorious  public 
opinion  of  Weimar,  or  the  yet  more  censorious  private 
opinion  of  Frau  von  Stein. 

On  that  lovely  Italo-American  morning  no  ghost  of 
these  old  dead  embarrassments  lingered  within  or  without 
the  Goethe  garden-house.  The  trees  which  the  poet  him- 
self planted  flung  a  sun-shot  shadow  upon  it,  and  about 
its  feet  basked  a  garden  of  simple  flowers,  from  which  the 
sweet  lame  girl,  who  limped  through  the  rooms  and  showed 
them,  gathered  a  parting  nosegay  for  her  visitors.  The 
few  small  living-rooms  were  above  the  ground-floor,  with 

kitchen  and  offices  below,  in  the  Italian  fashion;  in  one 

89 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

of  the  little  chambers  was  the  camp-bed  which  Goethe 
carried  with  him  on  his  journeys  through  Italy;  and  in 
the  larger  room  at  the  front  stood  the  desk  where  he  wrote, 
with  the  chair  before  it  from  which  he  might  just  have 
risen. 

All  was  much  more  livingly  conscious  of  the  great  man 
gone  than  the  proud  little  palace  in  the  town,  which  so 
abounds  with  relics  and  memorials  of  him.  His  library, 
his  study,  his  study-table,  with  everything  on  it  just  as 
he  left  it  when 

Cadde  la  stanca  man, 

are  there,  and  there  is  the  death-chair  facing  the  win- 
dow, from  which  he  gasped  for  "more  light"  at  last. 
The  handsome,  well-arranged  rooms  are  full  of  souve- 
nirs of  his  travel,  and  of  that  passion  for  Italy  which 
he  did  so  much  to  impart  to  German  hearts,  and  whose 
modern  waning  leaves  its  record  here  of  an  interest 
pathetically,  almost  amusingly,  faded.  They  intimate 
the  classic  temper  to  which  his  mind  tended  more  and 
more,  and  amid  the  multitude  of  sculptures,  pictures, 
prints,  drawings,  gems,  medals,  autographs,  there  is  the 
sense  of  the  many-mindedness,  the  universal  taste,  for 
which  he  found  room  in  little  Weimar,  but  not  in  his 
contemporaneous  Germany.  But  it  is  all  less  keenly 
personal,  less  intimate,  than  the  simple  garden-house,  or 
else,  with  the  great  troop  of  people  going  through  it, 
and  the  custodians  lecturing  in  various  voices  and  lan- 
guages to  the  attendant  groups,  the  Marches  had  it  less 
to  themselves  and  so  imagined  him  less  in  it. 

All  palaces  have  a  character  of  tiresome  unlivable- 
ness  which  is  common  to  them  everywhere,  and  very 
probably  if  one  could  meet  their  proprietors  in  them 
one  would  as  little  remember  them  apart  afterward 

as  the  palaces  themselves.     It  will  not  do  to  lift  either 

90 


WEIMAR 

houses  or  men  far  out  of  the  average;  they  become 
spectacles,  ceremonies;  they  cease  to  have  charm,  to 
have  character,  which  belongs  to  the  levels  of  life,  where 
alone  there  are  ease  and  comfort,  and  human  nature 
may  be  itself,  with  all  the  little  delightful  differences 
repressed  in  those  who  represent  and  typify. 

As  they  followed  the  custodian  through  the  grand- 
ducal  Residenz  at  Weimar,  March  felt  everywhere  the 
strong  wish  of  the  prince  who  was  Goethe's  friend  to 
ally  himself  with  literature,  and  to  be  human  at  least 
in  the  humanities.  He  came  honestly  by  his  passion 
for  poets;  his  mother  had  known  it  in  her  time,  and  Wei- 
mar was  the  home  of  Wieland  and  of  Herder  before  the 
young  Grand  Duke  came  back  from  his  travels  bringing 
Goethe  with  him,  and  afterward  attracting  Schiller.  The 
story  of  that  great  epoch  is  all  there  in  the  Residenz,  told 
as  articulately  as  a  palace  can.  There  are  certain  Poets' 
Rooms,  frescoed  with  illustrations  of  Goethe,  Schiller,  and 
Wieland;  there  is  the  room  where  Goethe  and  the  Grand 
Duke  used  to  play  chess  together;  there  is  the  conserva- 
tory opening  from  it  where  they  liked  to  sit  and  chat; 
everywhere  in  the  pictures  and  sculptures,  the  engravings 
and  intaglios,  are  the  witnesses  of  the  tastes  they  shared, 
the  love  they  both  had  for  Italy,  and  for  beautiful  Italian 
things.  The  prince  was  not  so  great  a  prince  but  that  he 
could  very  nearly  be  a  man;  the  court  was  perhaps  the 
most  human  court  that  ever  was;  the  Grand  Duke  and 
the  grand  poet  were  first  boon  companions,  and  then 
monarch  and  minister  working  together  for  the  good  of 
the  country;  they  were  always  friends,  and  yet  as  the 
Anerican  saw  in  the  light  of  the  New  World,  which  he 
carried  with  him,  how  far  from  friends!  At  best  it  was 
make-believe,  the  make-believe  of  superiority  and  inferior- 
ity, the  make-believe  of  master  and  man,  which  could 
only  be  the  more  painful  and  ghastly  for  the  endeavor  of 

91 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

two  generous  spirits  to  reach  and  rescue  each  other 
through  the  asphyxiating  unreality;  but  they  kept  up  the 
show  of  equality  faithfully  to  the  end.  Goethe  was  born 
citizen  of  a  free  republic,  and  his  youth  was  nurtured  in 
the  traditions  of  liberty;  he  was  one  of  the  greatest  souls 
of  any  time,  and  he  must  have  known  the  impossibility 
of  the  thing  they  pretended;  but  he  died  and  made  no 
sign,  and  the  poet's  friendship  with  the  prince  has  passed 
smoothly  into  history  as  one  of  the  things  that  might 
really  be.  They  worked  and  played  together;  they  dined 
and  danced;  they  picnicked  and  poetized,  each  on  his  own 
side  of  the  impassable  gulf ,  with  an  air  of  its  not  being 
there  which  probably  did  not  deceive  their  contempo- 
raries so  much  as  posterity. 

A  part  of  the  palace  was,  of  course,  undergoing  repair; 
and  in  the  gallery  beyond  the  conservatory  a  company  of 
workmen  were  sitting  at  a  table  where  they  had  spread 
their  luncheon.  They  were  somewhat  subdued  by  the 
consciousness  of  their  august  environment;  but  the  sight 
of  them  was  charming;  they  gave  a  kindly  interest  to  the 
place  which  it  had  wanted  before,  and  which  the  Marches 
felt  again  in  another  palace  where  the  custodian  showed 
them  the  little  tin  dishes  and  saucepans  which  the  Ger- 
man Empress  Augusta  and  her  sister  played  with  when 
they  were  children.  The  sight  of  these  was  more  affect- 
ing even  than  the  withered  wreaths  which  they  had  left 
on  the  death-bed  of  their  mother,  and  which  are  still 
moldering  there. 

This  was  in  the  Belvedere,  the  country  house  on  the 
height  overlooking  Weimar,  where  the  grand-ducal  family 
spend  the  month  of  May,  and  where  the  stranger  finds 
himself  amid  overwhelming  associations  of  Goethe,  al- 
though the  place  is  so  full  of  relics  and  memorials  of  the 
owners.  It  seemed,  in  fact,  to  be  a  storehouse  for  the 

wedding-presents  of  the  whole  connection,  which  were  on 

92 


WEIMAR 

show  in  every  room;  Mrs.  March  hardly  knew  whether 
they  heightened  the  domestic  effect  or  took  from  it;  but 
they  enabled  her  to  verify  with  the  custodian's  help  cer- 
tain royal  intermarriages  which  she  had  been  in  doubt 
about  before.  Her  zeal  for  these  made  such  favor  with 
him  that  he  did  not  spare  them  a  portrait  of  all  those 
which  March  hoped  to  escape;  he  passed  them  over, 
scarcely  able  to  stand,  to  the  gardener,  who  was  to  show 
them  the  open-air  theater  where  Goethe  used  to  take  part 
in  the  plays. 

The  Natur-Theater  was  of  a  classic  ideal,  realized  in 
the  trained  vines  and  clipped  trees  which  formed  the  cou- 
lisses. There  was  a  grassy  space  for  the  chorus  and  the 
commoner  audience,  and  then  a  few  semicircular  gradines 
cut  in  the  turf,  one  above  another,  where  the  more 
honored  spectators  sat.  Behind  the  seats  were  plinths 
bearing  the  busts  of  Goethe,  Schiller,  Wieland,  and 
Herder.  It  was  all  very  pretty,  and  if  ever  the  weather 
in  Weimar  was  dry  enough  to  permit  a  performance,  it 
must  have  been  charming  to  see  a  play  in  that  open  day 
to  which  the  drama  is  native,  though  in  the  late  hours  it 
now  keeps  in  the  thick  air  of  modern  theaters  it  has  long 
forgotten  the  fact.  It  would  be  difficult  to  be  Greek  under 
a  German  sky,  even  when  it  was  not  actually  raining, 
but  March  held  that  with  Goethe's  help  it  might  have 
been  done  at  Weimar,  and  his  wife  and  he  proved  them- 
selves such  enthusiasts  for  the  Natur-Theater  that  the 
walnut-faced  old  gardener  who  showed  it  put  together  a 
sheaf  of  the  flowers  that  grew  nearest  it  and  gave  them 
to  Mrs.  March  for  a  souvenir. 

They  went  for  a  cup  of  tea  to  the  caf£  which  looks,  as 
from  another  eyebrow  of  the  hill,  out  over  lovely  little 
Weimar  in  the  plain  below.  In  a  moment  of  sunshine  the 
prospect  was  very  smiling,  but  their  spirits  sank  over 

their  tea  when  it  came;  they  were  at  least  sorry  they  had 

93 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

not  asked  for  coffee.  Most  of  the  people  about  them  were 
taking  beer,  including  the  pretty  girls  of  a  young  ladies' 
school,  who  were  there  with  their  books  and  needlework, 
in  the  care  of  one  of  the  teachers,  apparently  for  the 
afternoon. 

Nothing  else  so  important  remained  for  March  as  the 
pleasure  of  sauntering  through  the  streets  on  the  way  to 
the  house  of  Schiller  and  looking  at  the  pretty  children 
going  to  school  with  books  under  their  arms.  It  was  the 
day  for  the  schools  to  open  after  the  long  summer  vaca- 
tion, and  there  was  a  freshness  of  expectation  in  the  shin- 
ing faces  which,  if  it  could  not  light  up  his  own  graybeard 
visage,  could  at  least  touch  his  heart. 

When  he  reached  the  Schiller  house  he  found  that  it 
was  really  not  the  Schiller  house,  but  the  Schiller  flat,  of 
three  or  four  rooms,  one  flight  up,  whose  windows  look 
out  upon  the  street  named  after  the  poet.  The  whole 
place  is  bare  and  clean;  in  one  corner  of  the  large  room 
fronting  the  street  stands  Schiller's  writing-table,  with  his 
chair  before  it;  with  the  foot  extending  toward  this  there 
stands,  in  another  corner,  the  narrow  bed  on  which  he 
died;  some  withered  wreaths  on  the  pillow  frame  a  picture 
of  his  death-mask,  which  at  first  glance  is  like  his  dead 
face  lying  there.  It  is  all  rather  tasteless,  and  all  rather 
touching,  and  the  place  with  its  meager  appointments,  as 
compared  with  the  rich  Goethe  house,  suggests  that  per- 
sonal competition  with  Goethe  in  which  Schiller  is  always 
falling  into  the  second  place.  Whether  it  will  be  finally  so 
with  him  in  literature  it  is  too  early  to  ask  of  tune,  and 
upon  other  points  eternity  will  not  be  interrogated.  "The 
great  Goethe  and  the  good  Schiller"  they  remain;  and 
yet,  March  reasoned,  there  was  something  good  in  Goethe 
and  something  great  in  Schiller. 

He  was  so  full  of  the  pathos  of  their  inequality  before 

the  world  that  he  did  not  heed  the  warning  on  the  door 

94 


WEIMAR 

of  the  pastry-shop  near  the  Schiller  house,  and  on  opening 
it  he  bedaubed  his  hand  with  the  fresh  paint  on  it.  He 
was  then  in  such  a  state  that  he  could  not  bring  his  mind 
to  bear  upon  the  question  of  which  cakes  his  wife  would 
probably  prefer,  and  he  stood  helplessly  holding  up  his 
hand  till  the  good  woman  behind  the  counter  discovered 
his  plight  and  uttered  a  loud  cry  of  compassion.  She  ran 
and  got  a  wet  napkin,  which  she  rubbed  with  soap,  and 
then  she  instructed  him  by  word  and  gesture  to  rub  his 
hand  upon  it,  and  she  did  not  leave  him  till  his  rescue  was 
complete.  He  let  her  choose  a  variety  of  the  cakes  for 
him,  and  came  away  with  a  gay  paper  bag  full  of  them, 
and  with  the  feeling  that  he  had  been  in  more  intimate 
relations  with  the  life  of  Weimar  than  travelers  are  often 
privileged  to  be.  He  argued  from  the  instant  and  intelli- 
gent sympathy  of  the  pastry  woman  a  high  grade  of 
culture  in  all  classes;  and  he  conceived  the  notion  of 
pretending  to  Mrs.  March  that  he  had  got  these  cakes 
from  a  descendant  of  Schiller. 


VIII 
BERLIN 

next  day  they  left  Weimar  for  Berlin,  and  on  the 
A  way  they  found  the  country  was  now  fertile  and  flat, 
and  now  sterile  and  flat;  near  the  capital  the  level  sandy 
waste  spread  almost  to  its  gates.  The  train  ran  quickly 
through  the  narrow  fringe  of  suburbs,  and  then  they  were 
in  one  of  those  vast  continental  stations  which  used  to 
put  our  outdated  depots  to  shame.  The  good  traeger 
who  took  possession  of  them  and  their  handbags  put  their 
boxes  on  a  baggage-bearing  droshky,  and  then  got  them 
another  droshky  for  their  personal  transportation.  This 
was  a  droshky  of  the  first  class,  but  they  would  not  have 
thought  it  so,  either  from  the  vehicle  itself  or  from  the 
appearance  of  the  driver  and  his  horses.  The  public 
carriages  of  Germany  are  the  shabbiest  in  the  world;  at 
Berlin  the  horses  look  like  old  hair  trunks  and  the  drivers 
like  their  moth-eaten  contents. 

The  Marches  got  no  splendor  for  the  two  prices  they 
paid,  and  their  approach  to  their  hotel  on  Unter  den 
Linden  was  as  unimpressive  as  the  ignoble  avenue  itself. 
It  was  a  moist,  cold  evening,  and  the  mean,  tiresome 
street  slopped  and  splashed  under  its  two  rows  of  small 
trees,  to  which  the  thinning  leaves  clung  like  wet  rags, 
between  long  lines  of  shops  and  hotels  which  had  neither 
the  grace  of  Paris  nor  the  grandiosity  of  New  York. 

March  quoted  in  bitter  derision: 

96 


BERLIN 

"Bees,  bees,  was  it  your  hydromel 
Under  the  Lindens?" 

and  his  wife  said  that  if  Commonwealth  Avenue  in  Boston 
could  be  imagined  with  its  trees  and  without  their  beauty, 
flanked  by  the  architecture  of  Sixth  Avenue,  with  dashes 
of  the  west  side  of  Union  Square,  that  would  be  the  famous 
Unter  den  Linden,  where  she  had  so  resolutely  decided 
that  they  would  stay  while  in  Berlin. 

They  had  agreed  upon  the  hotel,  and  neither  could 
blame  the  other  because  it  proved  second  rate  in  every- 
thing but  its  charges.  They  ate  a  poorish  tdble-d'hdte 
dinner  in  such  low  spirits  that  March  had  no  heart  to  get 
a  rise  from  his  wife  by  calling  her  notice  to  the  mouse 
which  fed  upon  the  crumbs  about  their  feet  while  they 
dined.  Their  English-speaking  waiter  said  that  it  was  a 
very  warm  evening,  and  they  never  knew  whether  this 
was  because  he  was  a  humorist,  or  because  he  was  lonely 
and  wished  to  talk,  or  because  it  really  was  a  warm  evening, 
for  Berlin.  When  they  had  finished,  they  went  out  and 
drove  about  the  greater  part  of  the  evening,  looking  for 
another  hotel,  whose  first  requisite  should  be  that  it  was 
not  on  Unter  den  Linden.  What  mainly  determined  Mrs. 
March  in  favor  of  the  large,  handsome,  impersonal  place 
they  fixed  upon  was  the  fact  that  it  was  equipped  for 
steam-heating;  what  determined  March  was  the  fact 
that  it  had  a  passenger-office  where,  when  he  wished  to 
leave,  he  could  buy  his  railroad  tickets  and  have  his  bag- 
gage checked  without  the  maddening  anxiety  of  doing  it 
at  the  station.  But  it  was  precisely  in  these  points  that 
the  hotel  which  admirably  fulfilled  its  other  functions  fell 
short.  The  weather  made  a  succession  of  efforts  through- 
out their  stay  to  clear  up  cold;  it  merely  grew  colder 
without  clearing  up,  but  this  seemed  to  offer  no  suggestion 

of  steam  for  heating  their  bleak  apartment  and  the  chilly 

97 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

corridors  to  the  management.  With  the  help  of  a  large 
lamp  which  they  kept  burning  night  and  day  they  got  the 
temperature  of  their  rooms  up  to  sixty;  there  was  neither 
stove  nor  fireplace;  the  cold  electric  bulbs  diffused  a  frosty 
glare;  and  in  the  vast,  stately  dining-room,  with  its 
vaulted  roof,  there  was  nothing  to  warm  them  but  their 
plates,  and  the  handles  of  their  knives  and  forks,  which 
by  a  mysterious  inspiration  were  always  hot. 

But  these  were  minor  defects  in  an  establishment  which 
had  many  merits,  and  was  mainly  of  the  temperament 
and  intention  of  the  large  English  railroad  hotels.  They 
looked  from  their  windows  down  into  a  gardened  square 
peopled  with  a  full  share  of  the  superabounding  statues 
of  Berlin  and  frequented  by  babies  and  nursemaids  who 
seemed  not  to  mind  the  cold  any  more  than  the  stone 
kings  and  generals.  The  aspect  of  this  square,  like  the 
excellent  cooking  of  the  hotel  and  the  architecture  of  the 
imperial  capital,  suggested  the  superior  civilization  of 
Paris.  Even  the  rows  of  gray  houses  and  private  palaces 
of  Berlin  are  in  the  French  taste,  which  is  the  only  taste 
there  is  in  Berlin.  The  suggestion  of  Paris  is  constant,  but 
it  is  of  Paris  in  exile,  and  without  the  chic  which  the  city 
wears  in  its  native  air.  The  crowd  lacks  this  as  much  as 
the  architecture  and  the  sculpture;  there  is  no  distinc- 
tion among  the  men  except  for  now  and  then  a  military 
figure,  and  among  the  women  no  style  such  as  relieves  the 
commonplace  rush  of  the  New  York  streets.  The  Berliners 
are  plain  and  ill  dressed,  both  men  and  women,  and  even 
the  little  children  are  plain.  Every  one  is  ill  dressed,  but 
no  one  is  ragged,  and  among  the  undersized  homely  folk 
of  the  lower  classes  there  is  no  such  poverty-stricken 
shabbiness  as  shocks  and  insults  the  sight  in  New  York. 
That  which  distinctly  recalls  our  metropolis  is  the  lofty 
passage  of  the  elevated  trains  intersecting  the  perspectives 

of  many  streets;  but  in  Berlin  the  elevated  road  is  carried 

98 


BERLIN 

on  massive  brick  archways  and  not  lifted  upon  gay,  crazy 
iron  ladders  like  ours. 

When  you  look  away  from  this,  and  regard  Berlin  on 
its  esthetic  side,  you  are  again  in  that  banished  Paris, 
whose  captive  art-soul  is  made  to  serve,  so  far  as  it  may 
be  enslaved  to  such  an  effect,  in  the  celebration  of  the 
German  triumph  over  France.  Berlin  has  never  the  pres- 
ence of  a  great  capital,  however,  in  spite  of  its  perpetual 
monumental  insistence.  There  is  no  streaming  movement 
in  broad  vistas;  the  dull-looking  population  moves  slug- 
gishly; there  is  no  show  of  fine  equipages.  The  prevailing 
tone  of  the  city  and  the  sky  is  gray;  but  under  the  cloudy 
heaven  there  is  no  responsive  Gothic  solemnity  in  the 
architecture.  There  are  hints  of  the  older  German  cities 
in  some  of  the  remote  and  obscure  streets,  but  otherwise 
all  is  as  new  as  Boston,  which,  in  fact,  the  actual  Berlin 
hardly  antedates. 

There  are  easily  more  statues  in  Berlin  than  in  any 
other  city  in  the  world,  but  they  only  unite  in  failing  to 
give  Berlin  an  artistic  air.  They  stand  in  long  rows  on  the 
cornices;  they  crowd  the  pediments;  they  poise  on  one 
leg  above  domes  and  arches;  they  shelter  themselves  in 
niches;  they  ride  about  on  horseback;  they  sit  or  lounge 
on  street  corners  or  in  garden  walks — all  with  a  mediocrity 
in  the  older  sort  which  fails  of  any  impression.  If  they 
were  only  furiously  baroque  they  would  be  something, 
and  it  may  be  from  a  sense  of  this  that  there  is  a  self- 
assertion  in  the  recent  sculptures,  which  are  always  patri- 
otic, more  noisy  and  bragging  than  anything  else  in  peren- 
nial brass.  This  offensive  art  is  the  modern  Prussian 
avatar  of  the  old  German  romantic  spirit,  and  bears  the 
same  relation  to  it  that  modern  romanticism  in  literature 
bears  to  romance.  It  finds  its  apotheosis  in  the  monument 
of  Kaiser  Wilhelm  I,  a  vast  incoherent  group  of  swelling 

and  swaggering  bronze,  commemorating  the  victory  of  the 

99 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

first  German  Emperor  in  the  war  with  the  last  French 
Emperor,  and  avenging  the  vanquished  upon  the  victors 
by  its  ugliness.  The  ungainly  and  irrelevant  assemblage 
of  men  and  animals  backs  away  from  the  imperial  palace, 
and  saves  itself  too  soon  from  plunging  over  the  border 
of  a  canal  behind  it,  not  far  from  Rauch's  great  statue  of 
the  great  Frederick.  To  come  to  it  from  the  simplicity 
and  quiet  of  that  noble  work  is  like  passing  from  some  ex- 
quisite masterpiece  of  naturalistic  acting  to  the  rant  and 
uproar  of  melodrama;  and  the  Marches  stood  stunned 
and  bewildered  by  its  wild  explosions. 

When  they  could  escape  they  found  themselves  so  con- 
venient to  the  imperial  palace  that  they  judged  best  to 
discharge  at  once  the  obligation  to  visit  it  which  must 
otherwise  weigh  upon  them.  They  entered  the  court  with- 
out opposition  from  the  sentinel,  and  joined  other  strangers 
straggling  instinctively  toward  a  waiting-room  in  one  cor- 
ner of  the  building,  where,  after  they  had  increased  to 
some  thirty,  a  custodian  took  charge  of  them  and  led  them 
up  a  series  of  inclined  planes  of  brick  to  the  state  apart- 
ments. In  the  antechamber  they  found  a  provision  of 
immense  felt  overshoes  which  they  were  expected  to  put 
on  for  then*  passage  over  the  waxed  marquetry  of  the 
halls.  These  roomy  slippers  were  designed  for  the  accom- 
modation of  the  native  boots;  and  upon  the  mixed  com- 
pany of  foreigners  the  effect  was  in  the  last  degree  humil- 
iating. The  women's  skirts  somewhat  hid  their  disgrace, 
but  the  men  were  openly  put  to  shame,  and  they  shuffled 
forward  with  their  bodies  at  a  convenient  incline  like  a 
company  of  snow-shoers.  In  the  depths  of  his  own  abase- 
ment March  heard  a  female  voice  behind  him  sighing  in 
American  accents,  "To  think  I  should  be  polishing  up 
these  imperial  floors  with  my  republican  feet!" 

The  protest  expressed  the  rebellion  which  he  felt  mount- 
ing in  his  own  heart  as  they  advanced  through  the  heavily 

100 


BERLIN 

splendid  rooms,  in  the  historical  order  of  the  family  por- 
traits recording  the  rise  of  the  Prussian  sovereigns  from 
margraves  to  emperors.  He  began  to  realize  here  the 
fact  which  grew  upon  him  more  and  more  that  imperial 
Germany  is  not  the  effect  of  a  popular  impulse,  but  of  a 
dynastic  propensity.  There  is  nothing  original  in  the  im- 
perial palace,  nothing  national;  it  embodies  and  proclaims  a 
powerful  personal  will,  and  in  its  adaptations  of  French  art 
it  appeals  to  no  emotion  in  the  German  witness  nobler  than 
his  pride  in  the  German  triumph  over  the  French  in  war. 

March  found  it  tiresome  beyond  the  tiresome  wont  of 
palaces,  and  he  gladly  shook  off  the  sense  of  it  with  his 
felt  shoes.  "Well,"  he  confided  to  his  wife  when  they  were 
fairly  out-of-doors,  "if  Prussia  rose  in  the  strength  of 
silence,  as  Carlyle  wants  us  to  believe,  she  is  taking  it  out 
in  talk  now,  and  tall  talk." 

The  dinner  which  the  Marches  got  at  a  restaurant  on 
Unter  den  Linden  almost  redeemed  the  avenue  from  the 
disgrace  it  had  fallen  into  with  them.  It  was  the  best 
meal  they  had  yet  eaten  in  Europe,  and  as  to  fact  and 
form  was  a  sort  of  compromise  between  a  French  dinner 
and  an  English  dinner  which  they  did  not  hesitate  to 
pronounce  Prussian.  The  waiter  who  served  it  was  a 
friendly  spirit,  very  sensible  of  their  intelligent  apprecia- 
tion of  the  dinner;  and  from  him  they  formed  a  more 
respectful  opinion  of  Berlin  civilization  than  they  had  yet 
held.  After  the  manner  of  strangers  everywhere  they 
judged  the  country  they  were  visiting  from  such  of  its 
inhabitants  as  chance  brought  them  in  contact  with;  and 
it  would  really  be  a  good  thing  for  nations  that  wish  to 
stand  well  with  the  world  at  large  to  look  carefully  to  the 
behavior  of  its  cabmen  and  car  conductors,  its  hotel  clerks 
and  waiters,  its  theater-ticket  sellers  and  ushers,  its  police- 
men and  sacristans,  its  landlords  and  salesmen;  for  by  these 

rather  than  by  its  society  women  and  its  statesmen  and 
8  101 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

divines  is  it  really  judged  in  the  books  of  travelers;  some 
attention  also  should  be  paid  to  the  weather,  if  the  climate 
is  to  be  praised.  In  the  railroad  cafe"  at  Potsdam  there  was 
a  waiter  so  rude  to  the  Marches  that  if  they  had  not  been 
people  of  great  strength  of  character  he  would  have  undone 
the  favorable  impression  which  the  soldiers  and  civilians 
of  Berlin  generally  had  been  at  such  pains  to  produce 
in  them;  and  throughout  the  week  of  early  September 
which  they  passed  there  it  rained  so  much  and  so  bitterly, 
it  was  so  wet  and  so  cold  that  they  might  have  come  away 
thinking  it  the  worst  climate  in  the  world,  if  it  had  not 
been  for  a  man  whom  they  saw  in  one  of  the  public  gar- 
dens pouring  a  heavy  stream  from  his  garden  hose  upon 
the  shrubbery  already  soaked  and  shuddering  in  the  cold. 
But  this  convinced  them  that  they  were  suffering  from 
weather  and  not  from  the  climate,  which  must  really  be 
hot  and  dry;  and  they  went  home  to  their  hotel  and  sat 
contentedly  down  in  a  temperature  of  sixty  degrees.  The 
weather  was  not  always  so  bad;  one  day  it  was  dry  cold 
instead  of  wet  cold,  with  rough,  rusty  clouds  breaking 
a  blue  sky;  another  day,  up  to  eleven  in  the  forenoon,  it 
was  like  Indian  summer;  then  it  changed  to  a  harsh 
November  air;  and  then  it  relented  and  ended  so  mildly 
that  they  hired  chairs  in  the  place  before  the  imperial 
palace  for  five  pfennigs  each,  and  sat  watching  the  life 
before  them.  Motherly  women-folk  were  there  knitting; 
two  American  girls  in  chairs  near  them  chatted  together; 
some  fine  equipages,  the  only  ones  they  saw  in  Berlin, 
went  by;  a  dog  and  a  man  (the  wife  who  ought  to  have 
been  in  harness  was  probably  sick,  and  the  poor  fellow 
was  forced  to  take  her  place)  passed  dragging  a  cart; 
some  school-boys  who  had  hung  their  satchels  upon  the 
low  railing  were  playing  about  the  base  of  the  statue  of 
King  William  III  in  the  joyous  freedom  of  German 

childhood. 

102 


BERLIN 

They  seemed  the  gayer  for  the  brief  moments  of  sun- 
shine, but  to  the  Americans,  who  were  Southern  by  virtue 
of  their  sky,  the  brightness  had  a  sense  of  lurking  winter 
in  it,  such  as  they  remembered  feeling  on  a  sunny  day 
in  Quebec.  The  blue  heaven  looked  sad ;  but  they  agreed 
that  it  fitly  roofed  the  bit  of  old  feudal  Berlin  which  forms 
the  most  ancient  wing  of  the  Schloss.  This  was  time- 
blackened  and  rude,  but  at  least  it  did  not  try  to  be 
French,  and  it  overhung  the  Spree,  which  winds  through 
the  city  and  gives  it  the  greatest  charm  it  has.  In  fact, 
Berlin,  which  is  otherwise  so  grandiose  without  grandeur 
and  so  severe  without  impressiveness,  is  sympathetic 
wherever  the  Spree  opens  it  to  the  sky.  The  stream  is 
spanned  by  many  bridges,  and  bridges  cannot  well  be 
unpicturesque,  especially  if  they  have  distant  statues  to 
help  them  out.  The  Spree  abounds  in  bridges,  and  it  has 
a  charming  habit  of  slow  hay-laden  barges;  at  the  land- 
ings of  the  little  passenger-steamers  which  ply  upon  it 
there  are  cafes  and  summer  gardens  and  these  even  in 
the  inclement  air  of  September  suggested  a  friendly  gaiety. 

The  Marches  saw  it  best  in  the  tour  of  the  elevated 
road  in  Berlin,  which  they  made  in  an  impassioned  mem- 
ory of  the  elevated  road  in  New  York.  The  brick  viaducts 
which  carry  this  arch  the  Spree  again  and  again  in  their 
course  through  and  around  the  city,  but  with  never  quite 
such  spectacular  effects  as  our  spidery  trestles  achieve., 
The  stations  are  pleasant,  sometimes  with  lunch-counters 
and  news-stands,  but  have  not  the  comic-opera-chalet 
prettiness  of  ours,  and  are  not  so  frequent.  The  road  is  not 
so  smooth,  the  cars  not  so  smooth-running  or  so  swift.  On 
the  other  hand,  they  are  comfortably  cushioned  and  they 
are  never  overcrowded.  The  line  is  at  times  above,  at 
times  below  the  houses,  and  at  times  on  a  level  with  them, 
alike  in  city  and  in  suburbs.  The  train  whirled  out  of 

thickly  built  districts,  past  the  backs  of  the  old  houses, 

103 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

into  outskirts  thinly  populated,  with  new  houses  spring- 
ing up  without  order  or  continuity  among  the  meadows 
and  vegetable-gardens,  and  along  the  ready-made,  elm- 
planted  avenues,  where  wooden  fences  divided  the  vacant 
lots.  Everywhere  the  city  was  growing  out  over  the  coun- 
try, in  blocks  and  detached  edifices  of  limestone,  sandstone, 
red  and  yellow  brick,  larger  or  smaller,  of  no  more  uni- 
formity than  our  suburban  dwellings,  but  never  of  their 
ugliness  or  lawless  offensiveness. 

In  an  effort  for  the  intimate  life  of  the  country  March 
went  two  successive  mornings  for  his  breakfast  to  the 
Cafe  Bauer,  which  has  some  admirable  wall-printings  and 
is  the  chief  cafe  on  Unter  den  Linden;  but  on  both  days 
there  were  more  people  in  the  paintings  than  out  of  them. 
The  second  morning  the  waiter  who  took  his  order  recog- 
nized him  and  asked,  "Wie  gesternf"  and  from  this  he 
argued  an  affectionate  constancy  in  the  Berliners,  and  a 
hospitable  observance  of  the  tastes  of  strangers.  At  his 
bankers',  on  the  other  hand,  the  cashier  scrutinized  his 
signature  and  remarked  that  it  did  not  look  like  the  sig- 
nature in  his  letter  of  credit,  and  then  he  inferred  a  sus- 
picious mind  in  the  moneyed  classes  of  Prussia;  as  he  had 
not  been  treated  with  such  unkind  doubt  by  Hebrew 
bankers  anywhere,  he  made  a  mental  note  that  the  Jews 
were  politer  than  the  Christians  in  Germany.  In  starting 
for  Potsdam  he  asked  a  traeger  where  the  Potsdam  train 
was,  and  the  man  said,  "Dat  train  dare,"  and  in  coming 
back  he  helped  a  fat  old  lady  out  of  the  car,  and  she 
thanked  him  in  English.  From  these  incidents,  both 
occurring  the  same  day  in  the  same  place,  the  inference 
of  a  wide-spread  knowledge  of  our  language  in  all  classes 
of  the  population  was  inevitable. 

In  this  obvious  and  easy  manner  he  studied  contempo- 
rary civilization  in  the  capital.  He  even  carried  his  re- 
searches farther,  and  went  one  rainy  afternoon  to  an 

104 


BERLIN 

exhibition  of  modern  pictures  in  a  pavilion  of  the  Thier- 
garten,  where  from  the  small  attendance  he  inferred  an 
indifference  to  the  arts  which  he  would  not  ascribe  to  the 
weather.  One  evening  at  a  summer  theater  where  they 
gave  the  pantomime  of  the  "Puppenfee"  and  the  operetta 
of  "Hansel  und  Gretel,"  he  observed  that  the  greater 
part  of  the  audience  was  composed  of  nice  plain  young 
girls  and  children,  and  he  noted  that  there  was  no  sort 
of  evening  dress;  from  the  large  number  of  Americans 
present  he  imagined  a  numerous  colony  in  Berlin,  where 
they  must  have  an  instinctive  sense  of  their  co-nationality, 
since  one  of  them,  in  the  stress  of  getting  his  hat  and  over- 
coat when  they  all  came  out,  confidently  addressed  him 
in  English.  But  he  took  stock  of  his  impressions  with  his 
wife,  and  they  seemed  to  him  so  few,  after  all,  that  he 
could  not  resist  a  painful  sense  of  isolation  hi  the  midst 
of  the  environment. 

They  made  a  Sunday  excursion  to  the  Zoological  Gar- 
dens in  the  Thiergarten,  with  a  large  crowd  of  the  lower 
classes,  but  though  they  had  a  great  deal  of  trouble  in 
getting  there  by  the  various  kinds  of  horse-cars  and  electric 
cars,  they  did  not  feel  that  they  had  got  near  to  the  pop- 
ular life.  They  endeavored  for  some  sense  of  Berlin  society 
by  driving  home  in  a  droshky,  and  on  the  way  they  passed 
rows  of  beautiful  houses,  in  French  and  Italian  taste, 
fronting  the  deep,  damp  green  park  from  the  Thiergarten- 
strasse,  in  which  they  were  confident  cultivated  and  de- 
lightful people  lived;  but  they  remained  to  the  last  with 
nothing  but  their  unsupported  conjecture. 

Then1  excursion  to  Potsdam  was  the  cream  of  their  so- 
journ in  Berlin.  They  chose  for  it  the  first  fair  morning, 
and  they  ran  out  over  the  flat  sandy  plains  surrounding 
the  capital,  and  among  the  low  hills  surrounding  Potsdam, 
before  it  actually  began  to  rain.  They  wished  immediately 

to  see  Sans  Souci  for  the  great  Frederick's  sake,  and  they 

105 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

drove  through  a  lively  shower  to  the  palace,  where  they 
waited  with  a  horde  of  twenty-five  other  tourists  in  a  gusty 
colonnade  before  they  were  led  through  Voltaire's  room 
and  Frederick's  death-chamber. 

The  French  philosopher  comes  before  the  Prussian 
prince  at  Sans  Souci  even  in  the  palatial  villa  which  ex- 
presses the  wilful  caprice  of  the  great  Frederick  as  few 
edifices  have  embodied  the  whims  or  tastes  of  their  owners. 
The  whole  affair  is  eighteenth-century  French  as  the 
Germans  conceived  it.  The  gardened  terrace  from  which 
the  low,  one-story  building,  thickly  crusted  with  baroque 
sculptures,  looks  down  into  a  many-colored  parterre,  was 
luxuriantly  French,  and  sentimentally  French  the  colon- 
naded front  opening  to  a  perspective  of  artificial  ruins, 
with  broken  pillars  lifting  a  conscious  fragment  of  archi- 
trave against  the  sky.  Within  all  again  was  French  in  the 
design,  the  decoration,  and  the  furnishing.  At  that  time 
there  was,  in  fact,  no  other  taste,  and  Frederick,  who 
despised  and  disused  his  native  tongue,  was  resolved  upon 
French  taste  even  in  his  intimate  companionship.  The 
droll  story  of  his  coquetry  with  the  terrible  free  spirit 
which  he  got  from  France  to  be  his  guest  is  vividly  reani- 
mated at  Sans  Souci,  where  one  breathes  the  very  air  in 
which  the  strangely  assorted  companions  lived,  and  in 
which  they  parted  so  soon  to  pursue  each  other  with 
brutal  annoyance  on  one  side  and  with  merciless  mockery 
on  the  other.  Voltaire  was  long  ago  revenged  upon  his 
host  for  all  the  indignities  he  suffered  from  him  in  their 
comedy;  he  left  deeply  graven  upon  Frederick's  fame  the 
trace  of  those  lacerating  talons  which  he  could  strike  to 
the  quick;  and  it  is  the  singular  effect  of  this  scene  of  their 
brief  friendship  that  one  feels  there  the  pre-eminence  of 
the  wit  in  whatever  was  most  important  to  mankind. 

The  rani  had  lifted  a  little  and  the  sun  shone  out  on 

the  bloom  of  the  lovely  parterre  where  the  Marches  profited 

106 


BERLIN 

by  a  smiling  moment  to  wander  among  the  statues  and 
the  roses  heavy  with  the  shower.  Then  they  walked  back 
to  their  carriage  and  drove  to  the  New  Palace,  which 
expresses  in  differing  architectural  terms  the  same  sub- 
jection to  an  alien  ideal  of  beauty.  It  is  thronged  without 
by  delightfully  preposterous  rococo  statues,  and  within 
it  is  rich  hi  all  those  curiosities  and  memorials  of  royalty 
with  which  palaces  so  well  know  how  to  fatigue  the  flesh 
and  spirit  of  their  visitors. 

The  Marches  escaped  from  it  all  with  sighs  and  groans 
of  relief,  and  before  they  drove  off  to  see  the  great  foun- 
tain of  the  Orangeries  they  dedicated  a  moment  of  pathos 
to  the  Temple  of  Friendship  which  Frederick  built  in 
memory  of  unhappy  Wilhelmina  of  Beyreuth,  the  sister 
he  loved  in  the  common  sorrow  of  their  wretched  home, 
and  neglected  when  he  came  to  his  kingdom.  It  is  beauti- 
ful in  its  baroque  way,  swept  up  to  on  its  terrace  by  most 
noble  staircases,  and  swaggered  over  by  baroque  allegories 
of  all  sorts.  Everywhere  the  statues  outnumbered  the 
visitors,  who  may  have  been  kept  away  by  the  rain;  the 
statues  naturally  did  not  mind  it. 

Sometime  hi  the  midst  of  their  sightseeing  the  Marches 
had  dinner  in  a  mildewed  restaurant,  where  a  compatriotic 
accent  caught  their  ear  in  a  voice  saying  to  the  waiter, 
"We  are  in  a  hurry."  They  looked  round  and  saw  that  it 
proceeded  from  the  pretty  nose  of  a  young  American  girl, 
who  sat  with  a  party  of  young  American  girls  at  a  neigh- 
boring table.  Then  they  perceived  that  all  the  people  in 
that  restaurant  were  Americans,  mostly  young  girls,  who 
all  looked  as  if  they  were  in  a  hurry.  But  neither  their 
beauty  nor  their  impatience  had  the  least  effect  with  the 
waiter,  who  prolonged  the  dinner  at  his  pleasure,  and 
alarmed  the  Marches  with  the  misgiving  that  they  should 
not  have  tune  for  the  final  palace  on  their  list. 

This  was  the  palace  where  the  father  of  Frederick,  the 

107 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

mad  old  Frederick  William,  brought  up  his  children  with 
that  severity  which  Solomon  urged  but  probably  did 
not  practise.  It  is  a  vast  place,  but  they  had  tune 
for  it  all,  though  the  custodian  made  the  most  of 
them  as  the  latest  comers  of  the  day,  and  led  them 
through  it  with  a  prolixity  as  great  as  their  waiter's. 
He  was  a  most  friendly  custodian,  and  when  he  found 
that  they  had  some  little  notion  of  what  they  wanted 
to  see,  he  mixed  zeal  with  his  patronage,  and  in 
a  manner  made  them  his  honored  guests.  They  saw 
everything  but  the  doorway  where  the  faithful  royal  father 
used  to  lie  in  wait  for  his  children  and  beat  them,  princes 
and  princesses  alike,  with  his  knobby  cane  as  they  came 
through.  They  might  have  seen  this  doorway  without 
knowing  it;  but  from  the  window  overlooking  the  parade- 
ground  where  his  family  watched  the  maneuvers  of  his 
gigantic  grenadiers,  they  made  sure  of  just  such  puddles 
as  Frederick  William  forced  his  family  to  sit  with  their 
feet  in,  while  they  dined  alfresco  on  pork  and  cabbage; 
and  they  visited  the  room  of  the  Smoking  Parliament, 
where  he  ruled  his  convives  with  a  rod  of  iron  and  made 
them  the  victims  of  his  bad  jokes.  The  measuring-board 
against  which  he  took  the  stature  of  his  tall  grenadiers 
is  there,  and  one  room  is  devoted  to  those  masterpieces 
which  he  used  to  paint  in  the  agonies  of  gout.  His  chef- 
d'ceuvre  contains  a  figure  with  two  left  feet,  and  there 
seemed  no  reason  why  it  might  not  have  had  three.  In 
another  room  is  a  small  statue  of  Carlyle,  who  did  so 
much  to  rehabilitate  the  house  which  the  daughter  of  it, 
Wilhelmina,  did  so  much  to  demolish  in  the  regard  of 
men. 

Their  driver  also  was  a  congenial  spirit,  and  when  he 
let  them  out  of  his  carriage  at  the  station  he  excused  the 
rainy  day  to  them.  He  was  a  merry  fellow  beyond  the 

wont  of  his  nation,  and  he  laughed  at  the  bad  weather,  as 

108 


BERLIN 

if  it  had  been  a  good  joke  on  them.  His  gaiety,  and  the 
red  sunset  light,  which  shone  on  the  stems  of  the  pines  on 
the  way  back  to  Berlin,  contributed  to  the  content  in 
which  they  reviewed  then*  visit  to  Potsdam.  They  agreed 
that  the  place  was  perfectly  charming,  and  that  it  was 
incomparably  expressive  of  kingly  will  and  pride.  These 
had  done  there  on  the  grand  scale  what  all  the  German 
princes  and  princelings  had  tried  to  do  in  imitation  and 
emulation  of  French  splendor.  In  Potsdam  the  grandeur 
was  not  a  historical  growth  as  at  Versailles,  but  was  the 
effect  of  family  genius,  in  which  there  was  often  the  curious 
fascination  of  insanity. 

They  felt  this  strongly  again  amid  the  futile  monuments 
of  the  Hohenzollern  Museum,  in  Berlin,  where  all  the 
portraits,  effigies,  personal  belongings  and  memorials  of 
that  gifted,  eccentric  race  are  gathered  and  historically 
disposed.  The  princes  of  the  mighty  line  who  stand  out 
from  the  rest  are  Frederick  the  Great  and  his  infuriate 
father;  and  in  the  waxen  likeness  of  the  son,  a  small,  thin 
figure,  terribly  spry,  and  a  face  pitilessly  alert,  appears 
something  of  the  madness  which  showed  in  the  life  of 
the  sire. 

They  went  through  many  rooms  in  which  the  memorials 
of  the  kings  and  queens,  the  emperors  and  empresses  were 
carefully  ordered,  and  felt  no  kindness  except  before  the 
relics  relating  to  the  Emperor  Frederick  and  his  mother. 
In  the  presence  of  the  greatest  of  the  dynasty  they  ex- 
perienced a  kind  of  terror  which  March  expressed,  when 
they  were  safely  away,  in  the  confession  of  his  joy  that 
those  people  were  dead. 


IX 

FRANKFORT 

THE  Marches  had  decided  to  go  by  Frankfort  and  the 
Rhine,  because  they  wished  to  revisit  the  famous 
river,  which  they  remembered  from  their  youth,  and  be- 
cause they  wished  to  stop  at  Diisseldorf,  where  Heinrich 
Heine  was  born.  Without  this  Mrs.  March,  who  kept  her 
husband  up  to  his  early  passion  for  the  poet  with  a  feeling 
that  she  was  defending  him  from  age  in  it,  and  he  began 
himself  to  think  that  it  would  be  interesting. 

They  took  a  sleeping-car  for  Frankfort;  they  woke 
early,  as  people  do  in  sleeping-cars  everywhere,  and  he 
dressed  and  went  out  for  a  cup  of  the  same  coffee  which 
sleeping-car  buffets  have  the  awful  secret  of  in  Europe  as 
well  as  America,  and  for  a  glimpse  of  the  twilight  land- 
scape. One  gray  little  town,  towered  and  steepled  and 
red-roofed  within  its  medieval  walls,  looked  as  if  it  would 
have  been  warmer  in  something  more.  There  was  a  heavy 
dew,  if  not  a  light  frost,  over  all,  and  in  places  a  pale  fog 
began  to  lift  from  the  low  hills.  Then  the  sun  rose  without 
dispersing  the  cold,  which  was  afterward  so  severe  in  their 
room  at  the  Russischer  Hof  in  Frankfort  that  in  spite  of 
the  steam  radiators  they  sat  shivering  in  all  their  wraps 
till  breakfast-time. 

There  was  no  steam  on  in  the  radiators,  of  course;  when 
they  implored  the  portier  for  at  least  a  lamp  to  warm  their 

hands  by  he  turned  on  all  the  electric  lights  without  raising 

110 


FRANKFORT 

the  temperature  in  the  slightest  degree.  Amid  these  mod- 
ern comforts  they  were  so  miserable  that  they  vowed  each 
other  to  shun,  as  long  as  they  were  in  Germany,  or  at 
least  while  the  summer  lasted,  all  hotels  which  were  steam- 
heated  and  electric-lighted.  They  heated  themselves  some- 
what with  their  wrath,  and  over  their  breakfast  they  re- 
lented so  far  as  to  suffer  themselves  a  certain  interest  in 
the  troops  of  all  arms  beginning  to  pass  the  hotel.  These 
were  fragments  of  the  great  parade,  which  had  ended  the 
day  before,  and  they  were  now  drifting  back  to  their 
several  quarters  of  the  empire.  Many  of  them  were  very 
picturesque,  and  they  had  for  the  boys  and  girls,  running 
before  and  beside  them,  the  charm  which  armies  and 
circus  processions  have  for  children  everywhere.  But 
their  passage  filled  with  cruel  anxiety  a  large  old  dog  whom 
his  master  had  left  harnessed  to  a  milk-cart  before  the 
hotel  door;  from  time  to  time  he  lifted  up  his  voice,  and 
called  to  the  absentee  with  hoarse,  deep  barks  that  almost 
shook  him  from  his  feet. 

The  day  continued  blue  and  bright  and  cold,  and  the 
Marches  gave  the  morning  to  a  rapid  survey  of  the  city, 
glad  that  it  was  at  least  not  wet.  What  afterward  chiefly 
remained  to  them  was  the  impression  of  an  old  town  as 
quaint  almost  and  as  Gothic  as  old  Hamburg,  and  a  new 
town,  handsome  and  regular,  and,  in  the  sudden  arrest  of 
some  streets,  apparently  overbuilt.  The  modern  archi- 
tectural taste  was,  of  course,  Parisian;  there  is  no  othery7 
taste  for  the  Germans;  but  in  the  prevailing  absence  of 
statues  there  was  a  relief  from  the  most  oppressive  char- 
acteristic of  the  imperial  capital  which  was  a  positive 
delight.  Some  sort  of  monument  to  the  national  victory 
over  France  there  must  have  been;  but  it  must  have  been 
unusually  inoffensive,  for  it  left  no  record  of  itself  in  the 
travelers'  consciousness.  They  were  aware  of  gardened 

squares  and  avenues,  bordered  by  stately  dwellings,  of 

111 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

dignified  civic  edifices,  and  of  a  vast  and  splendid  railroad 
station,  such  as  the  state  builds  even  in  minor  German 
cities,  but  such  as  our  paternal  corporations  had  not  yet 
given  us  in  America.  They  went  to  the  Zoological  Garden, 
where  they  heard  the  customary  Kalmucks  at  then*  public 
prayers  behind  a  high  board  fence;  and  as  pilgrims  from 
the  most  plutocratic  country  in  the  world  March  insisted 
that  they  must  pay  their  devoirs  at  the  shrine  of  the 
Rothschilds,  whose  natal  banking-house  they  revered 
from  the  outside. 

It  was  a  pity,  he  said,  that  the  Rothschilds  were  not  on 
his  letter  of  credit;  he  would  have  been  willing  to  pay 
tribute  to  the  Genius  of  Finance  in  the  percentage  on  at 
least  ten  pounds.  But  he  consoled  himself  by  reflecting 
that  he  did  not  need  the  money;  and  he  consoled  Mrs. 
March  for  their  failure  to  penetrate  to  the  ulterior  of 
the  Rothschilds'  birthplace  by  taking  her  to  see  the  house 
where  Goethe  was  born.  The  public  is  apparently  much 
more  expected  there,  and  in  the  friendly  place  they  were 
no  doubt  much  more  welcome  than  they  would  have  been 
in  the  Rothschild  house.  Under  that  roof  they  renewed  a 
happy  moment  of  Weimar,  which  after  the  lapse  of  a 
week  seemed  already  so  remote.  They  became  part  of 
some  such  sightseeing  retinue  as  followed  the  custodian 
about  hi  the  Goethe  house  in  Weimar,  and  of  an  emotion 
indistinguishable  from  that  of  their  fellow-sightseers. 
They  could  make  sure,  afterward,  of  a  personal  pleasure 
in  a  certain  prescient  classicism  of  the  house.  It  somehow 
recalled  both  the  Goethe  houses  at  Weimar,  and  it  some- 
how recalled  Italy.  It  is  a  separate  house  of  two  floors 
above  the  entrance,  which  opens  to  a  little  court  or  yard, 
and  gives  access  by  a  decent  stairway  to  the  living-rooms. 
The  chief  of  these  is  a  sufficiently  dignified  parlor  or  salon, 
and  the  most  important  is  the  little  chamber  in  the  third 

story  where  the  poet  first  opened  his  eyes  to  the  light 

112 


FRANKFORT 

which  he  rejoiced  in  for  so  long  a  life,  and  which,  dying, 
he  implored  to  be  with  him  more.  It  is  as  large  as  his 
death-chamber  in  Weimar,  where  he  breathed  this  prayer, 
and  it  looks  down  into  the  Italian-looking  court,  where 
probably  he  noticed  the  world  for  the  first  time  and 
thought  it  a  paved  inclosure  thirty  or  forty  feet  square. 
In  the  birth-room  they  keep  his  puppet  theater,  and  the 
place  is  fairly  suggestive  of  his  childhood;  later,  in  his 
youth,  he  could  look  from  the  parlor  windows  and  see  the 
house  where  his  earliest  love  dwelt.  So  much  remains  of 
Goethe  in  the  place  where  he  was  born,  and  as  such  things 
go  it  is  not  a  little.  The  house  is  that  of  a  prosperous  and 
well-placed  citizen,  and  speaks  of  the  senatorial  quality 
in  his  family  which  Heine  says  he  was  fond  of  recalling, 
rather  than  the  sartorial  quality  of  the  ancestor  who,  again 
as  Heine  says,  mended  the  Republic's  breeches. 

From  the  Goethe  house,  one  drives  by  the  Goethe  mon- 
ument to  the  Romer,  the  famous  town-hall  of  the  old  free 
imperial  city  which  Frankfort  once  was;  and  by  this 
route  the  Marches  drove  to  it,  agreeing  with  their  coach- 
man that  he  was  to  keep  as  much  in  the  sun  as  possible. 
It  was  still  so  cold  that  when  they  reached  the  Romer, 
and  he  stopped  in  a  broad  blaze  of  the  only  means  of 
heating  that  they  have  in  Frankfort  in  the  summer,  the 
travelers  were  loath  to  leave  it  for  the  chill  interior,  where 
the  German  emperors  were  elected  for  so  many  centuries. 
As  soon  as  an  emperor  was  chosen,  in  the  great  hall 
effigied  round  with  the  portraits  of  his  predecessors,  he 
hurried  out  in  the  balcony,  ostensibly  to  show  himself  to 
the  people,  but  really,  March  contended,  to  warm  up  in 
the  sun.  The  balcony  was  undergoing  repairs  that  day, 
and  the  travelers  could  not  go  out  on  it;  but  under  the 
spell  of  the  historic  interest  of  the  beautiful  old  Gothic 
place  they  lingered  in  the  interior  till  they  were  half  torpid 

with  the  cold.  Then  she  abandoned  to  him  the  joint  duty 

113 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

of  viewing  the  cathedral,  and  hurried  to  their  carriage, 
where  she  basked  in  the  sun  till  he  came  to  her.  He 
returned  shivering,  after  a  half-hour's  absence,  and  pre- 
tended that  she  had  missed  the  greatest  thing  in  the 
world,  but  as  he  could  never  be  got  to  say  just  what  she 
had  lost,  and  under  the  closest  cross-examination  could 
not  prove  that  this  cathedral  was  memorably  different 
from  hundreds  of  other  fourteenth-century  cathedrals, 
she  remained  in  lasting  content  with  the  easier  part  she 
had  chosen. 

As  it  was  warmer  outdoors  than  indoors  at  Frankfort, 
and  as  the  breadth  of  sunshine  increased  with  the  approach 
of  noon,  they  gave  the  rest  of  the  morning  to  driving  about 
and  ignorantly  enjoying  the  outside  of  many  Gothic 
churches,  whose  names  even  they  did  not  trouble  them- 
selves to  learn.  They  liked  the  river  Main  whenever  they 
came  to  it,  because  it  was  so  lately  from  Wurzburg,  and 
because  it  was  so  beautiful  with  its  bridges,  old  and  new, 
and  its  boats  of  many  patterns.  They  liked  the  market- 
place in  front  of  the  Romer  not  only  because  it  was  full 
of  fascinating  bargains  in  curious  crockery  and  wooden- 
ware,  but  because  there  was  scarcely  any  shade  at  all  in 
it.  They  read  from  their  Baedeker  that  until  the  end  of 
the  last  century  no  Jew  was  suffered  to  enter  the  market- 
place, and  they  rejoiced  to  find  from  all  appearances  that 
the  Jews  had  been  making  up  for  their  unjust  exclusion 
ever  since.  They  were  almost  as  numerous  there  as  the 
Anglo-Saxons  were  everywhere  else  in  Frankfort.  These, 
both  of  the  English  and  American  branches  of  the  race, 
prevailed  in  the  hotel  dining-room,  where  the  Marches 
had  a  midday  dinner  so  good  that  it  almost  made  amends 
for  the  steam-heating  and  electric-lighting. 


X 

MAYENCE  AND  THE  RIVER  RHINE 

A 5  soon  as  possible  after  dinner  they  took  the  train 
for  Mayence,  and  ran  Rhineward  through  a  pretty 
country  into  what  seemed  a  milder  climate.  It  grew  so 
much  milder,  apparently,  that  a  lady  in  their  compart- 
ment, to  whom  March  offered  his  forward-looking  seat, 
ordered  the  window  down,  when  the  guard  came,  without 
asking  their  leave.  Then  the  climate  proved  much  colder, 
and  Mrs.  March  cowered  under  her  shawls  the  rest  of  the 
way,  and  would  not  be  entreated  to  look  at  the  pleasant 
level  landscape  near  or  the  hills  far  off. 

The  Main  widened  and  swam  fuller  as  they  approached 
the  Rhine,  and  flooded  the  low-lying  fields  in  places  with 
a  pleasant  effect  under  a  wet  sunset.  When  they  reached 
the  station  in  Mayence  they  drove  interminably  to  the 
hotel  they  had  chosen  on  the  river-shore,  through  a  city 
handsomer  and  cleaner  than  any  American  city  they 
could  think  of,  and  great  part  of  the  way  by  a  street  of 
dwellings  nobler  than  even  Commonwealth  Avenue  in 
Boston.  It  was  planted,  like  that,  with  double  rows  of 
trees,  but  lacked  its  green  lawns;  and  at  tunes  the  sign 
of  Weinhandlung  at  a  corner  betrayed  that  there  was  no 
such  restriction  against  shops  as  keeps  the  Boston  street 
so  sacred.  Otherwise  they  had  to  confess  once  more  that 
any  inferior  city  of  Germany  is  of  a  more  proper  and 

dignified  presence  than  the  most  purse-proud  metropolis 

115 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

in  America.  To  be  sure,  they  said,  the  German  towns  had 
generally  a  thousand  years'  start;  but,  all  the  same,  the 
fact  galled  them. 

It  was  very  bleak,  though  very  beautiful,  when  they 
stopped  before  their  hotel  on  the  Rhine,  and  there  were 
the  reaches  of  the  storied  and  fabled  stream  with  its  boats 
and  bridges  and  wooded  shores  and  islands;  there  were 
the  spires  and  towers  and  roofs  of  the  town  on  either  bank 
crowding  to  the  river's  brink;  and  there  withindoors  was 
the  stately  portier  in  gold  braid,  and  the  smiling,  bowing, 
hand-rubbing  landlord,  alluring  them  to  his  most  expen- 
sive rooms,  which  so  late  in  the  season  he  would  fain  have 
had  them  take.  But  in  a  little  elevator,  that  mounted 
slowly,  very  slowly,  in  the  curve  of  the  stairs,  they  went 
higher  to  something  lower,  and  the  landlord  retired  baffled, 
and  left  them  to  the  ministrations  of  the  serving-men  who 
arrived  with  their  large  and  small  baggage.  All  these 
retired  in  turn  when  they  asked  to  have  a  fire  lighted  in 
the  stove,  and  sent  back  a  pretty  young  girl  to  do  it. 
She  came  indignant,  not  because  she  had  come  lugging  a 
heavy  hod  of  coal  and  a  great  arm-load  of  wood,  but  be- 
cause her  sense  of  fitness  was  outraged  by  the  strange 
demand. 

"What!"  she  cried.    "A  fire  in  September!" 

"Yes,"  March  returned,  inspired  to  miraculous  aptness 
in  his  German  by  the  exigency;  "yes,  if  September  is 
cold." 

The  girl  looked  at  him,  and  then,  either  because  she 
thought  him  mad,  or  liked  him  merry,  burst  into  a  loud 
laugh  and  kindled  the  fire  without  a  word  more. 

He  lighted  all  the  reluctant  gas-jets  in  the  vast  gilt 
chandelier,  and  in  less  than  half  an  hour  the  temperature 
of  the  place  rose  to  at  least  sixty-five  Fahrenheit,  with 
every  promise  of  going  higher.  Mrs.  March  made  herself 

comfortable  in  a  deep  chair  before  the  stove,  and  said 

116 


MAYENCE  AND  THE  RHINE 

she  would  have  her  supper  there;  and  he  went  down  to  a 
very  gusty  dining-room  on  the  ground-floor,  where  he 
found  himself  alone  with  a  young  English  couple  and  their 
little  boy.  They  were  friendly,  intelligent  people,  and 
would  have  been  conversable,  apparently,  but  for  the 
terrible  cold  of  the  husband,  which  he  said  he  had  con- 
tracted at  the  maneuvers  in  Hamburg.  March  said  he 
was  going  to  Holland,  and  the  Englishman  was  doubtful 
of  the  warmth  which  March  expected  to  find  there.  He 
seemed  to  be  suffering  from  a  suspense  of  faith  as  to  the 
warmth  anywhere;  from  tune  to  time  the  door  of  the 
dining-room  self-opened  in  a  silent,  ghostly  fashion  into 
the  court  without,  and  let  in  a  chilling  draught  about  the 
legs  of  all,  till  the  little  English  boy  got  down  from  his 
place  and  shut  it. 

March  found  his  wife  in  great  bodily  comfort  when  he 
went  back  to  her,  but  in  trouble  of  mind  about  a  clock 
which  she  had  discovered  standing  on  the  lacquered  iron 
top  of  the  stove.  It  was  a  French  clock,  of  architectural 
pretensions,  in  the  taste  of  the  First  Empire,  and  it  looked 
as  if  it  had  not  been  going  since  Napoleon  occupied  May- 
ence  early  in  the  century.  But  Mrs.  March  now  had  it 
sorely  on  her  conscience  where,  in  its  danger  from  the  heat 
of  the  stove,  it  rested  with  the  weight  of  the  Pantheon, 
whose  classic  form  it  recalled.  She  wondered  that  no  one 
had  noticed  it  before  the  fire  was  kindled,  and  she  required 
her  husband  to  remove  it  at  once  from  the  top  of  the 
stove  to  the  mantel  under  the  mirror,  which  was  the 
natural  habitat  of  such  a  clock.  He  said  nothing  could  be 
simpler,  but  when  he  lifted  it,  it  began  to  fall  all  apart, 
like  a  clock  in  the  house  of  the  Hoodoo.  Its  marble  base 
dropped  off;  its  pillars  tottered;  its  pediment  swayed  to 
one  side.  While  Mrs.  March  lamented  her  hard  fate,  and 
implored  him  to  hurry  it  together  before  any  one  came, 

he  contrived  to  reconstruct  it  in  its  new  place.  Then  they 
9  117 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

both  breathed  freer  and  returned  to  sit  down  before  the 
stove.  But  at  the  same  moment  they  both  saw,  inefface- 
ably  outlined  on  the  lacquered  top,  the  basal  form  of  the 
clock.  The  chambermaid  would  see  it  in  the  morning;  she 
would  notice  the  removal  of  the  clock  and  would  make  a 
merit  of  reporting  its  ruin  by  the  heat  to  the  landlord,  and 
in  the  end  they  would  be  mulcted  of  its  value.  Rather 
than  suffer  this  wrong  they  agreed  to  restore  it  to  its 
place  and  let  it  go  to  destruction  upon  its  own  terms. 
March  painfully  rebuilt  it  where  he  had  found  it,  and 
they  went  to  bed  with  a  bad  conscience  to  worse  dreams. 

March  spent  the  rainy  Sunday,  on  which  they  had 
fallen,  in  wandering  about  the  little  city  alone.  His  wife 
said  she  was  tired  and  would  sit  by  the  fire,  and  hear 
about  Mayence  when  he  came  in.  He  went  to  the  cathe- 
dral, which  has  its  renown  for  beauty  and  antiquity, 
and  he  there  added  to  his  stock  of  useful  information  the 
fact  that  the  people  of  Mayence  seemed  very  catholic 
and  very  devout.  They  proved  it  by  preferring  to  any  of 
the  divine  old  Gothic  shrines  in  the  cathedral  an  ugly 
baroque  altar  which  was  everywhere  hung  about  with 
votive  offerings.  A  fashionably  dressed  young  man  and 
young  girl  sprinkled  themselves  with  holy  water  as  rever- 
ently as  if  they  had  been  old  and  ragged.  Some  tourists 
strolled  up  and  down  the  aisles  with  their  red  guide-books 
and  studied  the  objects  of  interest.  A  resplendent  beadle 
in  a  cocked  hat,  and  with  a  long  staff  of  authority,  posed 
before  his  own  ecclesiastical  consciousness  in  blue  and 
silver.  At  the  high  altar  a  priest  was  saying  Mass,  and 
March  wondered  whether  his  consciousness  was  as  wholly 
ecclesiastical  as  the  beadle's,  or  whether  somewhere  in 
it  he  felt  the  historical  majesty,  the  long  human  con- 
secration of  the  place. 

He  wandered  at  random  in  the  town  through  streets 

German  and  quaint  and  old,  and  streets  French  and  fine 

118 


MAYENCE  AND  THE  RHINE 

and  new,  and  got  back  to  the  river,  which  he  crossed  on 
one  of  the  several  handsome  bridges.  The  rough  river 
looked  chill  under  a  sky  of  windy  clouds,  and  he  felt  out  of 
season,  both  as  to  the  summer  travel  and  as  to  the 
journey  he  was  making. 

In  the  morning  their  spirits  rose  with  the  sun,  though 
the  sun  got  up  behind  clouds  as  usual;  and  they  were 
further  animated  by  the  imposition  which  the  landlord 
now  practised  upon  them.  After  a  distinct  and  repeated 
agreement  as  to  the  price  of  their  rooms  he  charged  them 
twice  as  much,  and  then  made  a  merit  of  throwing  off  two 
marks  out  of  the  twenty  he  had  plundered  them  of. 

"Now  I  see,"  said  Mrs.  March,  on  their  way  down  to 
the  boat,  "how  fortunate  it  was  that  we  baked  his  clock. 
You  may  laugh,  but  I  believe  we  were  the  instruments  of 
justice." 

"Do  you  suppose  that  clock  was  never  baked  before?" 
asked  her  husband.  "The  landlord  has  his  own  arrange- 
ment with  justice.  When  he  overcharges  his  parting 
guests  he  says  to  his  conscience,  'Well,  they  baked  my 
clock.'  " 

The  morning  was  raw,  but  it  was  something  not  to  have 
it  rainy;  and  the  clouds  that  hung  upon  the  hills  and  hid 
their  tops  were  at  least  as  fine  as  the  long  board  signs  ad- 
vertising chocolate  on  the  river-banks.  The  smoke  rising 
from  the  chimneys  of  the  manufactories  of  Mayence  was 
not  so  bad,  either,  when  one  got  them  in  the  distance  a 
little;  and  March  liked  the  way  the  river  swam  to  the 
stems  of  the  trees  on  the  low  grassy  shores.  It  was  like 
the  Mississippi  between  St.  Louis  and  Cairo  hi  that,  and 
it  was  yellow  and  thick,  like  the  Mississippi,  though  he 
thought  he  remembered  it  blue  and  clear. 

Most  of  the  passengers  at  starting  were  English  and 
American;  but  they  showed  no  prescience  of  the  inter- 
national affinition,  which  has  since  realized  itself,  in  their 

119 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

behavior  toward  one  another.  They  held  silently  apart, 
and  mingled  only  in  the  effect  of  one  young  man  who 
kept  the  Marches  in  perpetual  question  whether  he  was 
a  Bostonian  or  an  Englishman.  His  look  was  Bostonian, 
but  his  accent  was  English;  and  was  he  a  Bostonian  who 
had  been  in  England  long  enough  to  get  the  accent,  or 
was  he  an  Englishman  who  had  been  in  Boston  long  enough 
to  get  the  look?  He  wore  a  belated  straw  hat  and  a  thin 
sack-coat,  and  in  the  rush  of  the  boat  through  the  raw 
air  they  fancied  him  very  cold,  and  longed  to  offer  him 
one  of  their  superabundant  wraps.  At  times  March  act- 
ually lifted  a  shawl  from  his  knees,  feeling  sure  that  the 
stranger  was  English  and  that  he  might  make  so  bold 
with  him;  then  at  some  glacial  glint  in  the  young  man's 
eye,  or  at  some  petrific  expression  of  his  delicate  face,  he 
felt  that  he  was  a  Bostonian,  and  lost  courage  and  let  the 
shawl  sink  again.  March  tried  to  forget  him  in  the  wonder 
of  seeing  the  Germans  begin  to  eat  and  drink,  as  soon  as 
they  came  on  board,  either  from  the  baskets  they  had 
brought  with  them  or  from  the  boat's  provision.  But  he 
prevailed,  with  his  smile  that  was  like  a  sneer,  through 
all  the  events  of  the  voyage,  and  took  March's  mind  off 
the  scenery  with  a  sudden  wrench  when  he  came  unex- 
pectedly into  view  after  a  momentary  disappearance. 
At  the  table  d'hote,  which  was  served  when  the  land- 
scape began  to  be  less  interesting,  the  guests  were 
expected  to  hand  their  plates  across  the  table  to 
the  stewards,  but  to  keep  their  knives  and  forks  through- 
out the  different  courses,  and  at  each  of  these  partial 
changes  March  felt  the  young  man's  chilly  eyes  upon 
him,  inculpating  him  for  the  semi-civilization  of  the 
management.  At  such  tunes  he  knew  that  he  was  a 
Bostonian. 

For  natural  sublimity  the  Rhine  scenery,  as  they  recog- 
nized once  more,  does  not  compare  with  the  Hudson 

120 


MAYENCE  AND  THE  RHINE 

scenery;  and  they  recalled  one  point  on  the  American 
river  where  the  Central  Road  tunnels  a  jutting  cliff,  which 
might  very  well  pass  for  the  rock  of  the  Loreley,  where 

she  dreams 

% 

Sole  sitting  by  the  shores  of  old  romance, 

and  the  trains  run  in  and  out  under  her  knees  unheeded. 
"Still,  still,  you  know,"  March  argued,  "this  is  the  Loreley 
on  the  Rhine,  and  not  the  Loreley  on  the  Hudson;  and 
I  suppose  that  makes  all  the  difference.  Besides,  the 
Rhine  doesn't  set  up  to  be  sublime;  it  only  means  to  be 
storied  and  dreamy  and  romantic,  and  it  does  it.  And 
then  we  have  really  got  no  Mouse  Tower;  we  might 
build  one,  to  be  sure." 

"Well,  we  have  got  no  denkmal,  either,"  said  his  wife, 
meaning  the  national  monument  to  the  German  recon- 
quest  of  the  Rhine,  which  they  had  just  passed,  "and 
that  is  something  in  our  favor." 

"It  was  too  far  off  for  us  to  see  how  ugly  it  was,"  he 
returned. 

"The  denkmal  at  Coblenz  was  so  near  that  the  bronze 
Emperor  almost  rode  aboard  the  boat." 

He  could  not  answer  such  a  piece  of  logic  as  that.  He 
yielded,  and  began  to  praise  the  orcharded  levels  which 
now  replaced  the  vine-purpled  slopes  of  the  upper  river. 
He  said  they  put  him  in  mind  of  orchards  that  he  had 
known  in  his  boyhood;  and  they  agreed  that  the  supreme 
charm  of  travel,  after  all,  was  not  in  seeing  something 
new  and  strange,  but  in  finding  something  familiar  and 
dear  in  the  heart  of  the  strangeness. 

At  Cologne  they  found  this  in  the  tumult  of  getting 
ashore  with  their  baggage  and  driving  from  the  steam- 
boat landing  to  the  railroad  station,  where  they  were  to 
get  their  train  for  Diisseldorf  an  hour  later.  The  station 

swarmed  with  travelers  eating  and  drinking  and  smoking, 

121 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

but  they  escaped  from  it  for  a  precious  half  of  their  golden 
hour,  and  gave  the  time  to  the  great  cathedral,  which 
was  built,  a  thousand  years  ago,  just  round  the  corner 
from  the  station,  and  is  therefore  very  handy  to  it.  Since 
they  saw  the  cathedral  last  it  had  been  finished,  and  now 
under  a  cloudless  evening  sky  it  soared  and  swept  up- 
ward like  a  pale  flame.  Within  it  was  a  bit  overclean,  a 
bit  bare,  but  without  it  was  one  of  the  great  memories 
of  the  race,  the  record  of  a  faith  which  wrought  miracles 
of  beauty,  at  least,  if  not  piety. 


XI 

DUSSELDORF 

THE  train  gave  the  Marches  another,  a  last,  view  of 
the  cathedral  as  they  slowly  drew  out  of  Cologne  and 
began  to  run  through  a  level  country  walled  with  far-off 
hills;  past  fields  of  buckwheat  showing  their  stems  like 
coral  under  their  black  tops;  past  peasant  houses  chang- 
ing their  wonted  shape  to  taller  and  narrower  forms;  past 
sluggish  streams  from  which  the  mist  rose  and  hung  over 
the  meadows,  under  a  red  sunset,  glassy  clear  till  the 
manifold  factory  chimneys  of  Diisseldorf  stained  it  with 
their  dun  smoke. 

This  industrial  greeting  seemed  odd  from  the  town 
where  Heinrich  Heine  was  born;  but  when  they  had 
eaten  their  supper  in  the  capital  little  hotel  they  found 
there,  and  went  out  for  a  stroll,  they  found  nothing  to 
remind  them  of  the  factories,  and  much  to  make  them 
think  of  the  poet.  The  moon,  beautiful  and  perfect  as  a 
stage  moon,  came  up  over  the  shoulder  of  a  church  as 
they  passed  down  a  long  street  which  they  had  all  to 
themselves.  Everybody  seemed  to  have  gone  to  bed,  but 
at  a  certain  corner  a  girl  opened  a  window  above  them 
and  looked  out  at  the  moon.  When  they  returned  to  their 
hotel  they  found  a  high-walled  garden  facing  it,  full  of 
black  depths  of  foliage.  In  the  night  March  woke  and 
saw  the  moon  standing  over  the  garden  and  silvering  its 

leafy  tops.    This  was  really  as  it  should  be  in  the  town 

123 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

where  the  idolized  poet  of  his  youth  was  born;  the  poet 
whom  of  all  other  he  had  adored,  and  who  had  once 
seemed  like  a  living  friend.  He  thought  long  thoughts  of 
the  past,  as  he  looked  into  the  garden  across  the  way, 
with  an  ache  for  his  perished  self  and  the  dead  compan- 
ionship of  his  youth,  all  ghosts  together  in  the  silvered 
shadow.  The  trees  shuddered  in  the  night  breeze,  and 
its  chill  penetrated  to  him  where  he  stood. 

His  wife  called  to  him  from  her  room.  "What  are  you 
doing?" 

"Oh,  sentimentalizing,"  he  answered,  boldly. 

"Well,  you  will  be  sick,"  she  said,  and  he  crept  back 
into  bed  again. 

They  had  sat  up  late,  talking  in  a  glad  excitement. 
But  he  woke  early,  as  an  elderly  man  is  apt  to  do  after 
broken  slumbers,  and  left  his  wife  still  sleeping.  He  was 
not  so  eager  for  the  poetic  interests  of  the  town  as  he  had 
been  the  night  before;  he  even  deferred  his  curiosity  for 
Heine's  birth-house  to  the  instructive  conference  which 
he  had  with  his  waiter  at  breakfast.  After  all,  was  not 
it  more  important  to  know  something  of  the  actual  life 
of  a  simple  common  class  of  men  than  to  indulge  a  faded 
fancy  for  the  memory  of  a  genius,  which  no  amount  of 
associations  could  feed  again  to  its  former  bloom?  The 
waiter  said  he  was  a  Nuremberger,  and  had  learned  English 
in  London,  where  he  had  served  a  year  for  nothing.  After- 
ward, when  he  could  speak  three  languages,  he  got  a 
pound  a  week,  which  seemed  low  for  so  many,  though 
not  so  low  as  the  one  mark  a  day  which  he  now  received 
in  Diisseldorf;  in  Berlin  he  paid  the  hotel  two  marks  a 
day.  March  confided  to  him  his  secret  trouble  as  to  tips, 
and  they  tried  vainly  to  enlighten  each  other  as  to  what 
a  just  tip  was. 

He  went  to  his  banker's,  and  when  he  came  back  he 

found  his  wife  with  her  breakfast  eaten,  and  so  eager  for 

124 


DUSSELDORF 

the  exploration  of  Heine's  birthplace  that  she  heard  with 
indifference  of  his  failure  to  get  any  letters.  It  was  too 
soon  to  expect  them,  she  said,  and  then  she  showed  him 
her  plan,  which  she  had  been  working  out  ever  since  she 
woke.  It  contained  every  place  which  Heine  had  men- 
tioned, and  she  was  determined  not  one  should  escape 
them.  She  examined  him  sharply  upon  his  condition, 
accusing  him  of  having  taken  cold  when  he  got  up  in  the 
night,  and  acquitting  him  with  difficulty.  She  herself  was 
perfectly  well,  but  a  little  fagged,  and  they  must  have  a 
carriage. 

They  set  out  in  a  lordly  landau  which  took  up  half  the 
little  Bolkerstrasse  where  Heine  was  born,  when  they 
stopped  across  the  way  from  his  birth-house,  so  that  she 
might  first  take  it  all  in  from  the  outside  before  they 
entered  it.  It  is  a  simple  street,  and  not  the  cleanest  of 
the  streets  in  a  town  where  most  of  them  are  rather  dirty. 
Below  the  houses  are  shops,  and  the  first  story  of  Heine's 
house  is  a  butcher  shop,  with  sides  of  pork  and  mutton 
hanging  in  the  windows;  above,  where  the  Heine  family 
must  once  have  lived,  a  gold-beater  and  a  frame-maker 
displayed  their  signs. 

But  did  the  Heine  family  really  once  live  there?  The 
house  looked  so  fresh  and  new  that  in  spite  of  the  tablet 
in  its  front  affirming  it  th3  poet's  birthplace  they  doubted; 
and  they  were  not  reassured  by  the  people  who  half  halted 
as  they  passed,  and  stared  at  the  strangers  so  anomalously 
interested  in  the  place.  They  dismounted  and  crossed  to 
the  butcher  shop,  where  the  provision-man  corroborated 
the  tablet,  but  could  not  understand  their  wish  to  go  up- 
stairs. He  did  not  try  to  prevent  them,  however,  and  they 
climbed  to  the  first  floor  above,  where  a  placard  on  the 
door  declared  it  private  and  implored  them  not  to  knock. 
Was  this  the  outcome  of  the  inmate's  despair  from  the 

intrusion  of  other  pilgrims  who  had  wished  to  see  the 

125 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

Heine  dwelling-rooms?  They  durst  not  knock  and  ask 
so  much,  and  they  sadly  descended  to  the  ground-floor, 
where  they  found  a  butcher  boy  of  much  greater  appar- 
ent intelligence  than  the  butcher  himself,  who  told  them 
that  the  building  in  front  was  as  new  as  it  looked,  and 
the  house  where  Heine  was  really  born  was  the  old  house 
in  the  rear.  He  showed  them  this  house,  across  a  little 
court  patched  with  mangy  grass  and  lilac-bushes;  and 
when  they  wished  to  visit  it  he  led  the  way.  The  place  was 
strewn  both  underfoot  and  overhead  with  feathers;  it  had 
once  been  all  a  garden  out  to  the  street,  the  boy  said,  but 
from  these  feathers,  as  well  as  the  odor  which  prevailed, 
and  the  anxious  behavior  of  a  few  hens  left  in  the  high 
coop  at  one  side,  it  was  plain  that  what  remained  of  the 
garden  was  now  a  chicken  slaughter-yard.  There  was  one 
well-grown  tree,  and  the  boy  said  it  was  of  the  poet's  time; 
but  when  he  let  them  into  the  house  he  became  vague  as 
to  the  room  where  Heine  was  born;  it  was  certain  only 
that  it  was  somewhere  up-stairs  and  that  it  could  not  be 
seen.  The  room  where  they  stood  was  the  frame-maker's 
shop,  and  they  bought  of  him  a  small  frame  for  a  memo- 
rial. They  bought  of  the  butcher's  boy,  not  so  commer- 
cially, a  branch  of  lilac;  and  they  came  away,  thinking 
how  much  amused  Heine  himself  would  have  been  with 
their  visit;  how  sadly,  how  merrily  he  would  have  mocked 
at  their  effort  to  revere  his  birthplace. 

They  were  too  old,  if  not  too  wise,  to  be  daunted  by 
their  defeat,  and  they  drove  next  to  the  old  court  garden 
beside  the  Rhine  where  the  poet  says  he  used  to  play  with 
the  little  Veronika,  and  probably  did  not.  At  any  rate, 
the  garden  is  gone;  the  Schloss  was  burned  down  long 
ago;  and  nothing  remains  but  a  detached  tower  in  which 
the  good  Elector  Jan  Wilhelm,  of  Heine's  time,  amused 
himself  with  his  many  mechanical  inventions.  The  tower 

seemed  to  be  in  process  of  demolition,  but  an  intelligent 

126 


DUSSELDORF 

workman  who  came  down  out  of  it  was  interested  in  the 
strangers'  curiosity,  and  directed  them  to  a  place  behind 
the  Historical  Museum  where  they  could  find  a  bit  of  the 
old  garden.  It  consisted  of  two  or  three  low  trees,  and 
under  them  the  statue  of  the  Elector  by  which  Heine  sat 
with  the  little  Veronika,  if  he  really  did.  A  fresh  gale 
blowing  through  the  trees  stirred  the  bushes  that  backed 
the  statue,  but  not  the  laurel  wreathing  the  Elector's 
head  and  meeting  in  a  neat  point  over  his  forehead.  The 
laurel  wreath  is  stone,  like  the  rest  of  the  Elector,  who 
stands  there  smirking  in  marble  ermine  and  armor,  and 
resting  his  baton  on  the  nose  of  a  very  small  lion,  who,  in 
the  exigencies  of  foreshortening,  obligingly  goes  to  nothing 
but  a  tail  under  the  Elector's  robe. 

This  was  a  prince  who  loved  himself  in  effigy  so  much 
that  he  raised  an  equestrian  statue  to  his  own  renown  in 
the  market-place,  though  he  modestly  refused  the  credit 
of  it,  and  ascribed  its  erection  to  the  affection  of  his  sub- 
jects. You  see  him  there  in  a  full-bottomed  wig,  mounted 
on  a  rampant  charger  with  a  tail  as  big  round  as  a  barrel, 
and  heavy  enough  to  keep  him  from  coming  down  on  his 
fore  legs  as  long  as  he  likes  to  hold  them  up.  It  was  to 
this  horse's  back  that  Heine  clambered,  when  a  small 
boy,  to  see  the  French  take  formal  possession  of  Diissel- 
dorf ;  and  he  clung  to  the  waist  of  the  bronze  Elector,  who 
had  just  abdicated,  while  the  burgomaster  made  a  long 
speech,  from  the  balcony  of  the  Rathhaus,  and  the  Elec- 
toral arms  were  taken  down  from  its  doorway. 

The  Rathhaus  is  a  salad-dressing  of  German  Gothic  and 
French  baroque  as  to  its  architectural  style,  and  is  charm- 
ing in  its  way,  but  the  Marches  were  in  the  market-place 
for  the  sake  of  that  moment  of  Heine's  boyhood.  They 
felt  that  he  might  have  been  the  boy  who  stopped  as  he 
ran  before  them,  and  smacked  the  stomach  of  a  large 
pumpkin  lying  at  the  feet  of  an  old  market-woman,  and 

127 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

then  dashed  away  before  she  could  frame  a  protest  against 
the  indignity.  From  this  incident  they  philosophized  that 
the  boys  of  Diisseldorf  are  as  mischievous  at  the  end  of 
the  nineteenth  century  as  they  were  at  the  beginning; 
and  they  felt  the  fascination  that  such  a  bounteous,  un- 
kempt old  market-place  must  have  for  the  boys  of  any 
period.  There  were  magnificent  vegetables  of  all  sorts  in 
it,  and  if  the  fruits  were  meager  that  was  the  fault  of  the 
rainy  summer,  perhaps.  The  market-place  was  very- 
dirty,  and  so  was  the  narrow  street  leading  down  from 
it  to  the  Rhine,  which  ran  swift  as  a  mountain  torrent 
along  a  slatternly  quay.  A  bridge  of  boats  crossing  the 
stream  shook  in  the  rapid  current,  and  a  long  procession 
of  market-carts  passed  slowly  over,  while  a  cluster  of 
scows  waited  in  picturesque  patience  for  the  draw  to 
open. 

They  saw  what  a  beautiful  town  that  was  for  a  boy  to 
grow  up  in,  and  how  many  privileges  it  offered,  how  many 
dangers,  how  many  chances  for  hair-breadth  escapes.  They 
chose  that  Heine  must  often  have  rushed  shrieking  joy- 
fully down  that  foul  alley  to  the  Rhine  with  other  boys; 
and  they  easily  found  a  leaf-strewn  stretch  of  the  slug- 
gish Diissel  in  the  Public  Garden,  where  his  playmate, 
the  little  Wilhelm,  lost  his  life  and  saved  the  kitten's. 
They  were  not  so  sure  of  the  avenue  through  which  the 
poet  saw  the  Emperor  Napoleon  come  riding  on  his  small 
white  horse  when  he  took  possession  of  the  Elector's  do- 
minions. But  if  it  was  that  where  the  statue  of  the  Kaiser 
Wilhelm  I  comes  riding  on  a  horse  led  by  two  Victories, 
both  poet  and  hero  are  avenged  there  on  the  accomplished 
fact.  Defeated  and  humiliated  France  triumphs  in  the 
badness  of  that  foolish  denkmal  (one  of  the  worst  in  all 
denkmal-ridden.  Germany),  and  the  memory  of  the  singer 
whom  the  Hohenzollern  family  pride  forbade  honor  in 

his  native  place  is  immortal  in  its  presence. 

128 


DtTSSELDORF 

On  the  way  back  to  their  hotel  March  made  some 
reflections  upon  the  open  neglect,  throughout  Germany, 
of  the  greatest  German  lyrist,  by  which  the  poet  might 
have  profited  if  he  had  been  present.  He  contended  that 
it  was  not  altogether  an  effect  of  Hohenzollern  pride, 
which  could  not  suffer  a  joke  or  two  from  the  arch-humor- 
ist; but  that  Heine  had  said  things  of  Germany  herself 
which  Germans  might  well  have  found  unpardonable. 
He  concluded  that  it  would  not  do  to  be  perfectly  frank 
with  one's  own  country.  Though,  to  be  sure,  there  would 
always  be  the  question  whether  the  Jew-born  Heine  had 
even  a  stepfatherland  in  the  Germany  he  loved  so  tenderly 
and  mocked  so  pitilessly.  He  had  to  own  that  if  he  were  a 
negro  poet  he  would  not  feel  bound  to  measure  terms  in 
speaking  of  America,  and  he  would  not  feel  that  his  fame 
was  in  her  keeping. 

Upon  the  whole,  he  blamed  Heine  less  than  Germany, 
and  he  accused  her  of  taking  a  shabby  revenge  in  trying 
to  forget  him;  in  the  heat  of  his  resentment  that  there 
should  be  no  record  of  Heine  in  the  city  where  he  was 
born,  he  came  near  himself  ignoring  the  fact  that  the 
poet  Freiligrath  was  also  born  there.  As  for  the  famous 
Diisseldorf  school  of  painting,  which  once  filled  the  world 
with  the  worst  art,  he  rejoiced  that  it  was  now  so  dead,  and 
he  grudged  the  glance  which  the  beauty  of  the  new  Art 
Academy  extorted  from  him.  It  is  in  the  French  taste, 
and  is  so  far  a  monument  to  the  continuance  in  one  sort 
of  that  French  supremacy  of  which  in  another  sort  an- 
other derikmal  celebrates  the  overthrow.  Diisseldorf  is 
not  content  with  the  denkmal  of  the  Kaiser  on  horseback, 
with  the  two  Victories  for  grooms;  there  is  a  second, 
which  the  Marches  found  when  they  strolled  out  again 
late  in  the  afternoon.  It  is  in  the  lovely  park  which  lies 
in  the  heart  of  the  city,  and  they  felt  in  its  presence  the 
only  emotion  of  sympathy  which  the  many  patriotic  mon- 

129 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

uments  of  Germany  awakened  in  them.  It  had  dignity 
and  repose,  which  these  never  had  elsewhere;  but  it  was, 
perhaps,  not  so  much  for  the  dying  warrior  and  the  pitying 
lion  of  the  sculpture  that  their  hearts  were  moved  as  for 
the  gentle  and  mournful  humanity  of  the  inscription, 
which  dropped  into  equivalent  English  verse  in  March's 
note-book: 

Fame  was  enough  for  the  Victors,  and  glory  and  verdurous  laurel; 
Tears  by  their  mothers  wept  founded  this  image  of  stone. 

To  this  they  could  forgive  the  vaunting  record,  on  the 
reverse,  of  the  German  soldiers  who  died  heroes  in  the 
war  with  France,  the  war  with  Austria,  and  even  the  war 
with  poor  little  Denmark! 

The  morning  had  been  bright  and  warm,  and  it  was 
just  that  the  afternoon  should  be  dim  and  cold,  with  a 
pale  sun  looking  through  a  September  mist,  which  seemed 
to  deepen  the  seclusion  and  silence  of  the  forest  reaches; 
for  the  park  was  really  a  forest  of  the  German  sort,  as 
parks  are  apt  to  be  in  Germany.  But  it  was  beautiful, 
and  they  strayed  through  it,  and  sometimes  sat  down  on 
the  benches  in  its  damp  shadows,  and  said  how  much 
seemed  to  be  done  in  Germany  for  the  people's  comfort 
and  pleasure.  In  what  was  explicitly  their  own,  as  well 
as  what  was  tacitly  theirs,  they  were  not  so  restricted  as 
we  were  at  home,  and  especially  the  children  seemed 
made  fondly  and  lovingly  free  of  all  public  things.  The 
Marches  met  troops  of  them  in  the  forest,  as  they  strolled 
slowly  back  by  the  winding  Diissel  to  the  gardened  avenue 
leading  to  the  park,  and  they  found  them  everywhere  gay 
and  joyful.  But  their  elders  seemed  subdued  and  were 
silent.  The  strangers  heard  no  sound  of  laughter  in  the 
streets  of  Diisseldorf,  and  they  saw  no  smiling  except  on 

the  part  of  a  very  old  couple,  whose  meeting  they  wit- 

130 


DtfSSELDORF 

nessed,  and  who  grinned  and  cackled  at  each  other  like 
two  children  as  they  shook  hands.  Perhaps  they  were 
indeed  children  of  that  sad  second  childhood  which  one 
would  rather  not  blossom  back  into. 

In  America,  life  is  yet  a  joke  with  us,  even  when  it  is 
grotesque  and  shameful,  as  it  so  often  is;  for  we  think  we 
can  make  it  right  when  we  choose.  But  there  was  no  joking 
in  Germany,  between  the  first  and  second  childhoods,  un- 
less behind  closed  doors.  Even  there  people  did  not  joke 
above  their  breath  about  kings  and  emperors.  If  they 
joked  about  them  in  print,  they  took  out  their  laugh  in  jail, 
for  the  press  laws  were  severely  enforced  and  the  prisons 
were  full  of  able  editors,  serious  as  well  as  comic.  Lese- 
majesty  was  a  crime  that  searched  sinners  out  hi  every  walk 
of  life,  and  it  was  said  that  in  family  jars  a  husband  some- 
tunes  had  the  last  word  of  his  wife  by  accusing  her  of 
blaspheming  the  sovereign,  and  so  having  her  silenced  for 
three  months,  at  least,  behind  penitential  bars. 

"Think,"  said  March,  "how  simply  I  could  adjust  any 
differences  of  opinion  between  us  in  Diisseldorf !" 

"Don't!"  his  wife  implored,  with  a  burst  of  feeling 
which  surprised  him.  "I  want  to  go  home!" 

They  had  been  talking  over  their  day,  and  planning  a 
journey  to  Holland  for  the  morrow,  when  it  came  to  this 
outburst  from  her  hi  the  last  half-hour  before  bed  which 
they  sat  prolonging  beside  their  stove. 

She  stopped  herself  with  a  look  at  her  husband,  and 
asked,  gently,  "Do  you  want  to  stay?" 

"Well,  I  don't  know,"  he  answered,  vaguely.  The  fact 
was,  he  was  sick  of  travel  and  of  leisure;  he  was  longing 
to  be  at  home  and  at  work  again.  But  if  there  was  to  be 
any  self-sacrifice  which  could  be  had,  as  it  were,  at  a 
bargain,  which  could  be  fairly  divided  between  them, 
and  leave  him  the  self  and  her  the  sacrifice,  he  was 

too  experienced  a  husband  not  to  see  the  advantage  of 

131 


HITHER  AND  THITHER  IN  GERMANY 

it  or  to  refuse  the  merit.  "I  thought  you  wished  to 
stay." 

"Yes,"  she  sighed,  "I  did.  It  has  been  very,  very  pleas- 
ant, and,  if  anything,  I  have  overenjoyed  myself.  We 
have  gone  romping  through  it  like  two  young  people, 
haven't  we?" 

"Yes,  and  we've  had  a  representative  variety  of  Ger- 
man cities.  First  we  had  Hamburg,  you  know,  a  great 
modern  commercial  center." 

"Yes!" 

"Then  we  had  Leipsic,  the  academic." 

"Yes!" 

"Then  Carlsbad,  the  supreme  type  of  a  German  health 
resort;  then  Nuremberg,  the  medieval;  then  Ansbach, 
the  extinct  princely  capital;  then  Wiirzburg,  the  eccle- 
siastical rococo;  then  Weimar,  for  the  literature  of  a 
great  epoch;  then  imperial  Berlin;  then  Frankfort,  the 
memory  of  an  old  free  city;  then  Mayence  of  the  baked 
clock;  then  the  Rhine  of  the  Lorelei;  then  Diisseldorf,  the 
center  of  the  most  poignant  personal  interest  in  the  world. 
I  don't  see  how  we  could  have  done  better,  if  we'd  planned 
it  all,  and  not  acted  from  successive  impulses." 

"Yes,  but  after  all  it  hasn't  been  ideal." 

March  laughed.     "Ideal!    What  is  ideal?" 

"Going  home!"  she  said,  with  such  passion  that  he  had 
not  the  heart  to  point  out  that  they  were  merely  return- 
ing to  their  old  duties,  cares,  and  pains,  with  the  worn- 
out  illusion  that  these  would  be  altogether  different  when 
they  took  them  up  again. 


THE    END 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  AT  LOS  ANGELES 

THE  UNIVERSITY  LIBRARY 
This  book  is  DUE  on  the  last  date  stamped  below 


JUL  1  6  1954 
JAN  12  1957 

2  g  nc 


MAY  18195$ 

JUN8    195$ 

i 


Form  L-0 
aotn-1, '41(1122) 


LOS  AKG3LKB 


DD41 

H83h  How  ells  - 
Hither  and 
thither  In 
Germany • 


DEMCO  ZMN 


JUL  1  6  i95| 


?AN  1  9  tare  nt_ 


001268985    7 


DD41 
H85h 


SUPPLIED     BY 

STATION  o.  Mr  ,r".:l' 


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